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.

§

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.

§

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.

§

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:

§

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.

Today is a big day for BBC television on the web with the launch of brand new websites for BBC One, BBC Two and BBC Four as well as an updated BBC Three site (building on February’s relaunch) and a new TV homepage.

It also heralds the switch on of live streaming (simulcast) for BBC Four, CBBC and CBeebies, joining BBC Three, BBC News and BBC Parliament, which are already available to watch live online, with BBC One and BBC Two due to follow later this year [see recent press release and previous multicast trial].

Last but by no means least, today also marks the passage of /programmes from beta to fully
fledged live service, boasting a permanent, findable web presence for every TV and radio programme that the BBC broadcasts.

A lot of things to launch all on one day? Unquestionably, but it’s indicative of the increasingly interconnected nature of the BBC’s online offer, where the channel websites are no longer discrete content areas, but are fully integrated with the wider programmes offer and beyond.

So, how did we set about redesigning (and hopefully improving) some of the most visited pages on bbc.co.uk? Well, we started with your feedback on the previous sites, collected via the bbc.co.uk Pulse survey, which told us that the basic tasks of finding out what’s on television and quickly locating information on specific programmes were most important and could be made easier.

With this in mind, we placed a schedule carousel along the top of the new channel homepages and a snapshot of what’s on now and next across every BBC TV channel at the heart of the new TV homepage. We also added a Programmes A-Z module to the top right of all of these pages to provide quick access to the wealth of programme information housed within the newly minted /programmes.

A significant development since the channel websites were last refreshed (in July 2007) is the availability of catch-up programming via BBC iPlayer, which we’ve reflected via a dedicated module on each of the homepages, showcasing the most popular programmes on demand with a link through to the full iPlayer offer. iPlayer availability is also reflected in the schedule carousel with a Watch Now button appearing for programmes which can be viewed on demand and Watch Live buttons for those being simulcast.

The eagle-eyed among you might notice that the channel homepages have a discreet temporal metaphor to them, with past programming on the left of the page, the present reflected in the centre, and future highlights to the right, reflecting the expanding life of programmes beyond a single moment of transmission (for more on this topic, check out ex-BBC staffer Dan Hill’s blog post on “The Social Life of a Broadcast”).

Lower down on the homepages, you’ll find links to top video clips, photo galleries and “Be on a Show” information, as well as channel-specific elements such as BBC Four’s Newsletter and Have Your Say comments forums.

Of course, it’s not all about the homepages. Behind the schedule links are full TV listings for each of the channels (including regional variations), which are fully integrated with /programmes, meaning they will they will be permanently accessible, unlike the What’s On What’s On listings (which these will replace) which became inaccessible after just two days.

Each channel site also has an area for channel trailers (known in the industry as “idents”), compiling the stings that appear between programmes on BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Three and BBC Four.

Far too many people have contributed to the above projects to list them individually; suffice to say it’s been a truly pan-BBC effort with colleagues from Vision, Audio & Music and Future Media & Technology all collaborating to raise the bar for the BBC’s programme and channel support online.

We’re really keen to hear your feedback on the new sites, so please leave a comment below.

Dan Taylor is Senior Portfolio Executive, Internet for BBC Vision.

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.

§

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.

§

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?.

§

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”.)

§

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.

In light of the recent hurricanes of 2008, we have elected to run this 2004 article again for LawyersDotCom and LawyersBulletin readers, in order to revisit some of the issues that impact foreign nationals and the immigration process when there is a natural disaster. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued policies to help immigrants with difficulties related to status, documentation, and inability to meet deadlines due to the widespread devastation. The impact of Hurricane Ike (PDF 35.2KB) is not as far reaching, but has resulted in the temporary closure of the Houston USCIS office, as well the Houston asylum office and three application support centers. Information on USCIS office closings, interview rescheduling, and other disaster-related matters is available on the USCIS WebSite. (Sep 19, 2008)

The U.S. Department of State (DOS) Visa Bulletin for October 2008 has been issued. This is the first Visa Bulletin of Fiscal Year 2009 (FY2009). As avid readers of LawyersDotCom may have learned when the Visa Bulletin chart for October was first posted on our website, the cutoff date for EB2 India moved backward considerably. The news for EB3 India, China, and Mexico was also bad, but not unexpected.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced on August 8, 2008 that the newly created U.S. passport card may be used in the employment eligibility verification process. According to the U.S. Department of State (DOS) WebSite, the first passport cards went into production on July 14, 2008. Long-time readers of LawyersDotCom and the LawyersBulletin may recall an earlier discussion of the card (then called a PASS card) included in our NewsBrief from October 27, 2006 entitled, Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative Update.

New Recruitment Module - a result of OrangeHRM and its user community collaboration has brought out a powerful, comprehensive and user friendly recruitment engine that can be easily plugged into your company’s website. SEACAUCUS, NJ (September 25, 2008)

An article in which you predicted my DEMISE (DEMISE OF ENTREPRENEUR MBOK) is a viscous attempt at a character assassination. This article is defamation in its purest form; you have irrevocably damaged family name. That article is posted on your website

What a poll Lets see, you have a poll on a website that you know from past comments on the mood of the group. Did you just have an extra applet you wanted to try out? Why not try a poll you may get some real information, like ummmm…..do we want to club