On May 22, 2008, Congress passed the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 (more commonly known as the “Farm Bill”; 19 U.S.C. 1484 note). The Farm Bill requires U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to collect, for a one-year period, a declaration as to whether the transaction value of imported merchandise is determined on the basis of the price paid in the first or earlier sale occurring prior to the introduction of the merchandise into the United States. (more)

A few months ago, I gave one of the keynotes at our annual BBC Future Media & Technology conference.

I ended my speech, which ranged from an overview of the evolution of user interaction models on technology to cloud computing and the semantic web, with a picture of the Google search window…

…and the statement:

All this innovation, and yet this is the best we can currently do for content discovery: brute force text search. We have to do better if we want to evolve.

Okay, it was for dramatic effect, but I believed then and believe now that I was absolutely accurate.

Search is one of the darkest backwaters of technological and experience development (particularly on the internet.) Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we, the BBC, can improve search on our site, and how we can drive innovation around search in general in the industry.

Earlier this month, there were a couple of really interesting launches in the world of search.

First, Yahoo! released Boss, which is a completely open, virtually limit-free search API. What’s interesting about this is that it’s a brilliant defensive move against Google’s dominance.

Yahoo! is clearly Number Two, but since it’s a marginally zero sum game in terms of monetisable search traffic, it needs a different way to take market share. “Embrace and extend”, indeed.

This was followed almost immediately by Cuil, a Xoogle (ex-Google employee company - more about that later) which launched to much fanfare, and mostly collapsed into a mess of unmet audience expectations - always risky.

Frankly, I haven’t played with it enough to make a decision, but it wasn’t nearly as compelling as the rest of those mentioned in this post.

I was lucky enough to join Jane Weedon, our controller of business development, on a trip to Asia and to the USA to do some learning about small, young innovative companies and market trends.

In the realm of “oh my god, that looks like rocket science”, we file Viewdle. Essentially, it’s an image search engine with facial recognition software.

Born in the Ukraine out of what I suspect was a largely military development effort, the technology is funded by Anthem, a SoCal VC and frankly, after a thirty minute demo, I was blown away.

See for yourself at reuters.viewdle.com/searchm. I’m keen to spend more time on this, and feel like there’s an unknown number of ways to leverage this.

One of my favourite meetings from Asia was Naver, the Korean search giant owned by the largest online gaming portal in Korea (another interesting space for a blog).

With near 80% market share in Korea (Google has less than 4%!), 16m people visit Naver every day. They have managed to capture and data cache the majority of Korean language content on the internet.

Now, to my non-Korean-speaking western eye, this is a confusing, hard-to-understand site, but there are some really keen innovations here:

• They mix different kinds of results into an answer, presenting only relevant ones
• Their scrap tool (sort of like social bookmarking à la digg or delicious) allows users to copy parts of one blog or site onto another, helping to grow the interconnectedness of the interweb and building relevance
• Behind Naver is an engine of editorial staff who review
• They have a Google Answers- or Yahoo! Knowledge-like offer which helps to identify new subjects and content to deep dive on
• Other than the aforementioned editorial staff, which is outsourced to low-cost centres like China, the company is run by a team of just over 80 people who are amazingly innovative and agile
• They also have JR Naver kids’ search

Interestingly, US-based Mahalo lists Naver as its biggest inspiration. They have duplicated the Naver editorial model, but built it up into an amazing engine of content discovery and improvement.

Mahalo creates pages about selected subjetcs using its amazing editorial/ curation team which is distributed around the world . Their page curators, who come from all walks of life - professors, doctors, homemakers - create the pages for a nominal sum (under fifty quid) per page. It’s a model similar to Wikipedia, but managed (ie, you have to demonstrate your skills and you are evaluated regularly to assess the quality of your work).

It is an interesting alternative to the approach taken by Daylife and others (including the BBC with its Topic Pages - previously blogged here) where pages are produced automatically using search queries to find and aggregate content. This is obviously cheaper and computers can find much more content than human editors ever could. But Mahalo’s pages have a hand-built quality that can only be produced by skilled editors and well thought out workflows.

Co-founder and CEO (and a long-time friend of mine) Jason Calcanis talks about how this makes his content more “trusted”; which I think is a really interesting concept.

His new line, which I’ll repeat here, is that trust is one of the most important currencies/assets in the digital future. Frankly, I’d put it up there with metadata.

Digital has a function of changing the nature and assets in the future. Attention, data and trust, rather than cash and inventory: brave new world, indeed.

Mahalo is a Sequoia investment. I was lucky enough, with some colleagues from the BBC and Sony, to attend a Sequoia open day in SF. It’s essentially a beauty parade by the VC of their best and brightest (and most relevant) investments for larger strategic or VIP friends and family.

One of the most compelling things they showed us was SearchMe, which I was quite impressed by. Essentially, it’s a combination of a new search engine (built by Xooglers) with a new, Flash-based interface.

Now, the interface borrows heavily from Apple’s interaction pattern library and it’s a bit clunky for browsing, but it is quite striking.

I find that it’s also really good at predicting what I’m looking for, with a few exceptions. I see pieces of the old snap search engine (the creative director, Jason Fields, just joined us at the BBC) as well as X1 (long may it live - one of the most useful tools ever).

Frankly, however, it really shone when they loaded up the Searchme Ap on my iPhone. Oh MY GOD! WOW. Extremely compelling search on a phone (it replaces the internal search and I don’t miss it a bit.)

I’m converted, though they need some slightly better browse mechanisms (see what Apple did in the newest version of iTunes.)

Cuil has some interesting visual metaphors as well: the blue type, minimalist and frankly ugly and not very usable Google UX seems to be crumbling!

I really think that the next two years will be defined by those of us who can really raise the efficiency of discovery (both targeted - ie, I know what I want, and browsing/snacking - ie, I’m looking for something stimulating).

When you marry solid data and indexing (everyone forgets that Google’s code base is almost ten years old), useful new datapoints (facial recognition, behavioral targeting, historical precedent, trust, etc) with a compelling and useful user experience, we may see some changes in the market leadership of search.

Richard Titus is Controller, User Experience & Design for BBC Future Media & Technology.

At the blog for Scripting Enabled (”a two day conference and workshop aimed at making the web a more accessible place”), some slides from a talk from the Beeb:

Jonathan Hassell of the BBC did a joint presentation with Phil Teare on the impacts and symptoms of dyslexia on web design and usability. Jonathan goes through the results of a BBC research and gives some tips on how to not block out dyslexic users completely.

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Security writer Graham Cluley picks up on this Telegraph piece about spam received by subscibers to the mailing list for Electric Proms and adds:

Long time followers of news on the Sophos website will know that this is not the first time that a BBC mailing list has sent an unauthorised message. Five years ago, ardent fans of The Archers, the world’s longest running drama serial, were accidentally sent a copy of the Sobig worm.

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Another Interesting Stuff; another interesting conference write-up from Backstage’s Rain Ashford [see previous]. This one’s from the Google Developer Day at Wembley Stadium, with notes and pics at the Backstage Blog.

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From the abstracts for PyCon UK, two talks by BBC Research’s Michael Sparks:

Kamaelia is designed as a toolkit for making concurrent software systems that are maintainable using a component based approach very similar to Unix pipelines. It was originally designed for use in a network systems environment and so is designed with systems that are naturally highly concurrent in mind - mainly from the perspective of trying to make it simple to comprehend unknown systems.

Update 2008-09-24: After some Yammering with Michael, we can now see the slides:

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Finally, now that everything the BBC broadcasts gets its own permanent page, which ones are people twittering about?

• Excellent play on BBC R3: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00dkvqt (mflavin)
• wishes we could get more BBC programmes in Canada, especially this one about Stonehenge - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7625145.stm (paul_henman)
• Brecht-Weill “Mahagonny” on Radio 3: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00dk49w (defjaf)
• Listening to Psmith in the City on the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00djjpn (seabright)
• BBC Four????Roxy Music????????http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00djn0s (shihlun)
• Katy Perry covered MGMT Electric Feel acoustic. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00dcqnm fast forward the player to 2:26. LOVES it. (gurj)
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00df61v Listen again here to my debate with Anthony Grayling last night on Radio 3, on ‘humanism’. (RupertRead)
• just watched this http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00dmpd2 Gawd bless humph (squaccs)
• one more day to watch the manc music fest on iplayer http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00d9g2x (dangermain)
• Watching episode 1 of Earth: The Climate Wars (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00djvq9) thanks to Usenet since I don’t have an actual TV (deepthinking)

Alan Connor is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog.

Tom Scott (of BBC FM&T for A&Mi) on his personal blog outlines a history of the /programmes project. /Programmes came out of beta this week:

At the time the only solution available to the team was a static web publishing solution and trying to collapse the entire graph down to a series of static webpages was, frankly, a nightmare…

Roo Reynolds (a new arrival at BBC Vision as Multiplatform Executive, Social Media) blogs an “Augmented Reality” panel he chaired at the Virtual Worlds Expo conference, with slides, video and notes.

Nick Reynolds is editor, BBC Internet Blog.

Editors’ note: This is a post based on an article in this week’s edition of Ariel, the BBC’s in-house weekly magazine, by Audio & Music Interactive’s Head Of Distribution Technology John Ousby. It includes John’s images from the International Broadcasting Convention, as blogged at pressred.org.

Dr Leonardo Chiariglione, the founder of MPEG, was unfortunately upstaged at his own keynote address at IBC in Amsterdam last Friday.

Google and YouTube are parasites. It’s all about content; the rest is just railway lines.

This was the message given by ITV boss Michael Grade in his recorded interview included in the session. A few people in the audience started clapping until they realised they were outnumbered by the growing army of raised eyebrows.

Were we in a conference from the late ’90s? Or did this have anything to do with the fact that ITV is due to be relegated from the FTSE 100 later this month?

The idea that content can be easily separated from technology and distribution is plain wrong. One has been informing the other since the start of broadcasting, through the production technology available at the time or the way audiences find, share, discuss and consume it.

The biggest mistakes I have seen in the broadcast world are when interactivity is slapped on once the paint is dry in the production process or when a technology application is created without consideration of the audience it is intended for.

DAB slideshow showing some of the output from the olympics twitter feed from 5live

You can’t spend much time at IBC without hearing about convergence and the ever-redrawn battle lines between content owners, broadcasters, internet service providers and telcos.

One of the debates at this year’s event was around mobile TV [mp3], which on the broadcast side hasn’t had the most prestigious start after several years of hype, trials and struggling commercial services.

Mobile operators have struggled with small volumes of low quality video clips in walled gardens that are expensive to consume and unreliable in reception. With mobile services, context is everything - not just the web (or telly) bundled across to a smaller screen, but content which takes account of where and how it is consumed, and by whom.

You could draw the conclusion that video on the move just isn’t as important as was thought. I believe it’s just a question of when.

We are in a transitionary phase where we are just starting to see the possibilities for mobile video once it’s made easy to consume and the pricing structure is relatively understood, as with the iPhone.

Let’s just start to think about mobile video and audio, of which TV is a subset rather than a starting point - both broadcast- and internet-delivered video have a part to play in the future of mobile TV.

p2p-next looks like anything else on display at IBC until you understand what it’s doing. Live p2p video streaming based on the tribler infrastructure - a potential solution to iPlayer success… Great project involving BBC’s George Wright, Pioneer and the EBU among others. Of course, not just video can use this. Nice work.

Walking the halls at IBC proffered the usual mix of landmark moments, promising new technology and the next biggest, brightest display screens, some of which can be seen in this IBC set on Flickr.

It made me proud to see that the BBC were involved in a lot of the best of show - DVB-T2 (next generation digital terrestrial TV delivery), Super High Vision (HD on steroids) and p2p-next (live peer to peer streaming), to name a few.

Let’s just hope that next year can see a keynote fit for 2009 not 1999.

DVB-T2 - rotated constellations (256 QAM): BBC has been leading the work of the DVB group in its next generation DVB-T work. DVB-T2 gives about 50% extra capacity than DVB-T and will be essential for Freeview HDTV services - currently planned for the end of 2009. More detail here:
dvb-t2

John Ousby is head of distribution technologies, Audio & Music Interactive.

At The Industry Standard, Jeremy Kirk has a detailed feature called BBC’s iPlayer Takes Online Video Programming To The Edge, with lots of quotes from iPlayer nabob Anthony Rose, stats and DRM observations:

But over the last 10 months, the iPlayer has seen major upgrades to the way it can deliver video, video quality and compatibility with an ever-expanding number of mobile devices, putting the iPlayer on the forefront of Internet video delivery. The BBC is solving many of the problems with online video delivery that have vexed other services around the world.

There’s also a paean to iPlayer from Audit Bureau of Circulations chief exec Chris Boyd in Media Guardian:

I love the iPlayer; I just think it’s amazing. About two years ago I tried to use the ITV equivalent, which would never download, and then over Christmas my daughter and I wanted to watch separate programmes at the same time and a friend of hers told her that the iPlayer was very good. Since then I’ve used it pretty much every week.

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If your bag is reasonably-expressed complaints, quibbles and feature requests around BBC stuff, the place to go is the Beeb section of Get Satisfaction. One user, Gids, asks:

Any idea why All Bar Luke is listed as being by “BBC Null” in the iPlayer radio player?

The iPlayer team is dissecting this bug right now; meanwhile, critical friend of the BBC Frankie Roberto is frustrated that the “search box on the BBC News website should default to searching news, not random BBC stuff” - also onpassed.

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There’s more detail on the BBC’s involvement in BarcampBrighton3 [as described below] at the BBC Backstage Blog, with more detailed notes on Ant Miller’s talk A BBC Micro For the 21st Century?.

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Also via Backstage, Chris Riley has been responding to feedback and adding features to his Track Playing prototype:

Chris has added integration with the BBC’s Radio Pop beta, using the Radio Pop API. So now you can Pop your trackplaying habits to Radiopop. Chris is using OAuth to pass the users information back and forth smoothly.

Shane Richmond [see below] will be delighted to learn that the first track brought up when BBC Internet Blog launched the service was…

(During the time it took to type that, we’ve moved onto Rihanna’s “Disturbia”.)

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Finally, you can enjoy the slightly uneasy and voyeuristic experience of seeing what people are twittering about iPlayer in the new iPlayer/ Twitter feed on Internet Blog’s Pageflake:

• Watching Humphrey Littleton’s last I’m Sorry I Haven’t Clue on iPlayer (publicenergy)
• Watching the BBC iplayer on my Mac while doing my Sunday family duties. Cooking for 8 today. Pork is in. (royski)
• I’m impressed they managed to get Dara O’Briain Live at the Theatre Royal on iPlayer. (aJanuary)
• Surprised to see some films listed on bbc iplayer (diceliving76)
• Has anyone else noticed that the volume control on the BBC iPlayer goes “all the way to eleven”. (Braziel)
• Didn’t feel up to Thomas Hardy tonight so will catch Tess of the D’Urbervilles on iPlayer another night. It looks good. (squatbetty)
• Nice iplayer error message - ‘This doesn’t seem to be working. Try again later’. Not even a please! (ianbarber)
• the bbc could do with some of those +1 channels that itv and c4 have. Iplayer, whilst good, looks crap on my lounge TV (via the wii). (guyweb)
• @guyweb I don’t think the wii iPlayer supports the high-quality feeds that the main iPlayers has, does it? (JeFurry)
• ???? ?????????? ??? ????. ??? ?? bbc ?? ??????? ???? ??’??? ??? FAQ ??? iplayer ??????? ???????? ?????? ??? ????? ???? ??? uk (internetakias)
• BBC iplayer offered on Nokia N96 - That is really cool but do u need to pay TV license fee to receive TV programs on mobile?? (vidyavi)

vidyavi is clearly not an avid Internet Blog reader (how odd!), as the answer (”it depends if you’re watching live or on demand”) is here.

Alan Connor is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog.

I promised you an update on numbers after the Olympics and here it is. The statistics are endless and with the analytics tools at my disposal I could prove that I am the rightful King of Sheba, so I’ll just give a summary of some key messages.

Overall we served approx. 50m sport video streams during the Olympics. This averaged out at about 3m per day, but peaked at 5.5m on Tuesday 19th August. There were many athletes you were interested in and Chris Hoy and the cycling team, Rachel Adlington, Christine Ohuruogu, Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps were all athletes that generated large audiences.

As an example of what people were watching, here’s what people watched (ie, started a video stream) or read (ie, viewed a web page) on Wednesday 20th when Usain Bolt was winning the 200 metres:

• 200m text story: 914,543
• 200m video: 501,943
• 200m heats text story: 61,257
• 100m video: 54,357
• 200m heats video: 42,986
• 200m interview video: 33,500
• 100m text story: 33,500

We found that as much as 45% of the Olympics audience engaged with video from the Olympics site. The trend is more interesting in that in general you were keen to engage with video. Looking at how we promote AV, how we create clips and how we deliver them are all things to build on from the Olympics.

For example, the opening ceremony live stream was embedded on the News and Sport front pages, as well as the Olympics index. Around 80% played the stream on the Sport indexes, while 50% played the stream on the News index. In general, a quarter of the traffic which came to the Olympics site from the UK watched video (that is, those in the UK who can access the geographically rights-restricted streams).

My favourite statistic is that you watched nearly 9.7m hours of Olympic video on the website (yes, you did!) and regularly there were over 100,000 watching at the same time though the peak stayed at just under 200,000 across live and on demand videos.

How do the online and TV viewing experiences compare? Well, online you watched live video for about 15 minutes per day, and dipped in and out of on demand clips for about 3mins20sec per day. TV figures are in Roger Mosey’s post here.

The Chinese can’t get enough of the Olympics, like they don’t want it to end and it’s interesting to note that even though they could not see the video, there was a large international audience on the BBC Olympics site, some watching the live text updates, some looking for story details.

As well as the glamour of the Olympics, day-to-day news gathering carried on and also on Wednesday 20th, we served 2.7m news AV clips, with a peak in demand following the Madrid plane crash.

These are all amazing figures and if you are interested in comparing different countries in Europe and how they engaged online, you can start by looking here.

So another lesson? If this blog post had video in it, more of you would have read it… perhaps.

Thanks to you for enjoying the Olympics with us so much. Now go watch the Paralympics… you can get back to work in October.

John O’Donovan is Chief Technical Architect, BBC FM&T Journalism.

ASUS and Foxconn are in direct competition on more than one market, but that hasn’t stopped them from cooperating on other. ASUS has been looking for a partner to outsource the production of its X series notebooks, and it seems to have found one in

ASUS and Foxconn are in direct competition on more than one market, but that hasn’t stopped them from cooperating on other. ASUS has been looking for a partner to outsource the production of its X series notebooks, and it seems to have found one in

Peek is a device that does e-mail and only e-mail.

(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

Last Thursday, I took a look at Peek, a handheld device that does e-mail, and only e-mail. And by the end of the review, I was left wondering if I was missing something. Do people really want an e-mail-only device? Are there people out there who have cell phones, but want another gadget just for checking e-mail?

And it’s not like the Peek has an Internet browser, or an instant-messaging client, or a personal organizer. No, all it does is e-mail. That’s it. It’s not even compatible with Microsoft Exchange, so we can’t say it’d be good for corporate use.

And if that doesn’t make you skeptical about it, the Peek costs a whopping $100. plus it has a $20 monthly fee. Sure there are no pesky cell phone contracts involved, but what good is having an unlocked device if it isn’t a phone?

Now, this is not to say the device itself is bad. On the contrary, we like the Peek’s ease of use, and the QWERTY keyboard is a joy to type on. I also really like the jog dial on the side, which lets you scroll through messages quickly and easily. Importing your e-mail account is as easy as entering in your e-mail address and password (do note that it uses POP and not IMAP, so you’ll end up deleting e-mail from both in-boxes, which is a pain). The battery life is also pretty good, lasting about two or three days with a typical day’s usage.

But, well, that’s about it. Peek claims that its value is its simplicity, and we can’t fault them for that. But for such a simple device, shouldn’t it be cheaper?

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