Photo by Rain Rabbit on Flickr. All rights reserved.
Much of the content being played with here is from the BBC's internal TV archive. This has never, in its entirety, been made public before but is available just for this weekend. Developers have access to every programme broadcast by the BBC for the past year - it's like the iPlayer, but without all those frustrating restrictions about 7 days, blah blah blah. What an amazing toy...
• Matthew Somerville (MySociety) and Simon Willison (who has worked with Adrian Holovaty on the Lawrence Journal World)are looking at lengthy files of the subtitling for BBC programmes. These show the subtitles and the time they appear, so the guys are trying to decide whether to make this into a search tool, or some kind of navigation tool to help you skip forward to a particular part of the programme. Willison arrived with a different idea, which would be about setting time zones for users of social networking sites so their friends would know if it was OK to call the or not. He also wanted to look at tracking the time of posts to services like Twitter to build up an idea of when people normally go to bed - but as soon as they saw the BBC feeds that idea went out of the window...
• Ben Fields, Yves Raimond and Kurt Jacobsen are working out how to connect Last.fm profiles with PIPS, the Programme Information Platform. That's just one of the APIs the developers have been given this weekend.
• Shaun Hare (Nottingham University) and Tim Nash (search optimisation specialist) are looking at the metadata on MP3s of BBC podcasts, and developing a way of reading that metadata - such as the content of the show, related photos, etc - before the MP3 file is played. The idea is to create something powerful for users with accessibility issues, as well as richer programme information that allows programmes to more accurately picked up by search engines.
Technorati Tags: mashed08
