Tomski.com - Tom Loosemore's Blog

For the past couple of months I've been on secondment for 2 days a week to the Cabinet Office, working with the likes of Richard Allen on the Power of Information Task Force.

Earlier this week Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson launched Show Us A Better Way, a competition with a £20k prize fund to develop the best ideas suggested by the public for products which re-use public data. We also released a couple of new APIs and data dumps. ("After all, public data is your data.")

The response has been, well, really rather good.

I have but one niggle. While Tom and I have been getting lotsa props, the people who worked hardest and longest on all this were getting none of the credit, for the dumb reason that they're civil servants, and therefore, convention dictates used to dictate, must remain nameless.

Well, stuff that. The Cabinet Office just published new social media guidelines enabling all UK civil servants to be normal human beings outside, as well as inside, the government firewall.

So, Richard Stirling, John Sheridan, William Perrin and others - I salute you.

I've long wanted House of Commons debates made available in ways which take best advantage of the wonders of t'Interweb. The accessibility and searchability of the web transforms our ability to hold our elected representatives to account for their actions in Parliament.

First TheyWorkForYou.com worked its magic with the text of Hansard, and now the mySociety folk have added video to the mix, courtesy of footage from BBC Parliament and some clever crowdsourcing of the necessary metadata.

Unlike Parliament's own 28-day video archive (or BBC Parliament), the TheyWorkForYou video will persist, and thus our democracy is now pleasingly embeddable. John Wilkes would have approved.

By way of example, here's George Osborne getting stuck into the Chancellor about a recent OECD report on the UK economy.

After less than a week volunteers had matched 10,000 speeches to the accompanying video clip.

So head over here to help match the remaining 25,000 - though be warned, it's surprisingly addictive once you get started.

Stephen Dunn and I were lucky enough to win the 'Best Cruise' award for our annotated Flickr photo story of our East Coast cruise in June 2007. Not sure how many at the Wanderer Class Association AGM knew what Flickr was, but they seemed enthusiastic nonetheless...

I've spent much of the past 6 months immersed in the whys and wherefors of Public Service Broadcasting.

This morning Ofcom - my employer - published the review's first phase.

I'm glad to say that we've managed to hack up a web version of the review's Exec Summary. This let's you link to and comment on each paragraph, as well as follow links to supporting evidence.

It might work, it might not. Either way, it's a cheap way to explore new ways to broaden access to a public consultation. It's an idea I tried and failed to get the BBC to go for at the time of the publication of Building Public Value, the BBC's Charter Review manifesto published in 2004. Times change, in a good way.

More traditionally, we also just launched a PSB Review blog so we can join the conversation across the wider web about the future of public service broadcasting in the uK.

With a fair wind, I might even get the CEO to post...

Update

In a lengthy comment below, Michael Sparks answers my question by making a compelling case that you'll only need a TV licence if you actually watch a broadcast TV over the net.

Over on the BBC Internet blog, Ashley Highfield (Director of BBC Future Media and Technology) says that using the BBC's iPlayer on demand Internet TV service does not in itself mean you are liable to pay the TV Licence Fee.

However, he continues, if you watch a live BBC broadcast via the Internet (BBC News 24 and BBC Parliament are both available) then you will need a licence.

This begs a question:

• Are you liable for the licence fee if you possess equipment which is capable of letting you watch live BBC TV channels? The legislation itself talks about “apparatus installed or used for the purpose of receiving (whether by means of wireless telegraphy or otherwise) any television programme service, whether or not it is installed or used for any other purpose.”


• Or, as Ashley suggests, is it the act of actually watching a live BBC TV broadcast via the Internet which makes you liable for the licence fee?

If the former is true, then the fact that you can already watch BBC TV channels live over the Internet implies that any household in the UK with a broadband connected PC now needs a TV licence. After all, they possess a device capable of watching live BBC TV channels, even if they do not choose to do so. Nick Reynolds, the editor of the BBC Internet blog, seems to be firmly in this camp.

If the latter is true, then those with a 'normal' TV set could now claim "But I don't ever watch BBC Channels." when caught without a licence. Needless to say, this would be a hard claim to disprove, and I'm surprised that those taken to court for non-payment of the licence fee are not already employing it as a defence left, right and centre.

Now I'm no lawyer, and thus could easily be talking tosh on this issue.

But I can't help but wonder whether Charles Moore has broadband...

Tony Curzon has written an excellent Open Democracy piece on how auction theory suggests that Google should evolve PageRank in the light of rampant SEO.

I've thought for a while that the equivalent would be for Google to give you not your own PageRank as a score, but the PageRank of your next closest "competitor", or web site. You could then SEO all you like, it won't affect your PageRank, except in so far as it affects your closest competitors'. The trick in this scheme will be implementing who your "nearest neighbour" is for any web page.

Auction design is hard, and things can go badly wrong when faced with cunning and potentially collusive players. Both black and white hat SEOs are cunning, and increasingly collusive.

No wonder Google is stocking up on game theorists.

Interestingly (!!?), the BBC appears to have dropped DRM from the new Flash streaming version of iPlayer.

I've got Flash v8 running on my Mac in Firefox, and iPlayer videos play aok, full screen mode apart.

I'm pretty sure that iPlayer would demand I install the new Flash v9.3 player if the BBC had turned on the DRM feature overhead which ships as part of Adobe's new Flash Streaming Server v3.

Or am I wrong?

For the next few days you'll be able to see below an embedded video showing BBC Parliament coverage of one of Thursday's debates in the House of Commons.

It's good news that the BBC let us embed their programmes rather than force us to traipse off to iPlayer, even if you do currently have to hack the embed code up yourself.

This embedability ticks off BBC Web Principle Number 13:

13. Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes.

However, come next week the video will no longer work (I hope it breaks gracefully) since the BBC removes programmes from the Web 7 days after broadcast - even debates from the House of Commons, where there are zero rights issues.

This breaks BBC Web Principle Number 8, which states:

8. Make sure all your content can be linked to, forever.

This is a shame, but I suppose justifies the Principle's implicit order of importance, since being able to embed something from the BBC is moot if said something then gets deleted by the BBC after a few days. This is the Web. Stuff should persist.

Ah well, it's progress nonetheless. As is the quietly-revolutionary-if-about-5-years-late bbc.co.uk/programmes, offering a permanent page for every episode of every BBC programme, and which now also embeds iPlayer media for as long as its available after broadcast. (Thanks Tom!)