"bbc" in Weblog

I thought that podcasting would take a while to take off… And by a while, I mean years. How many people have iPods? Yes lots, but how many people even have MP3 players? Still not a majority. Of those iPod owners how many know how to add podcasts from anywhere other than the iTunes music store interface? Very, very few, I think. It took me ages to find that text box hidden away in a dropdown into which I could paste feed urls. That means that the vast majority of podcasts, those further down the popularity curve (Long Tail anyone?!), will remain obscure. This morning it occurred to me that I might be wrong though.

The BBC is advertising podcasts on its World Service. News bulletins, documentaries, the works are all up for download. They were experimenting with this stuff when I freelanced for them 3 years ago but I just hadn’t noticed how completely they’d embraced it. With that sort of exposure, on a global scale, podcasts could be tipped (buzzword bingo!) into the mainstream far sooner than I was predicting…

The BBC has just launched a new service under the title Backstage. Basically, they’re starting up a whole series of APIs to let developers get at their content directly. So far things are quite limited… They have a series of RSS feeds for news, sport, weather and tv listings and APIs for searching the BBC and generating a geo-location from a postcode.

Watch this space…

These are a good set of guidelines for any sort of writing…

Good writing is not a luxury; it is an obligation.

I couldn’t help picturing Bird & Fortune while I read this… Still, this Talking Point is an interesting read.