For my part I presented the work we’ve been doing on Wildlife Finder – how we’re starting to publish and consume data on the web. Ed Summers has a great write up of what we’re doing I’ve also published my slides here:

I also joined Paul Miller, Jeni Tennison, Ian Davis and Timo Hannay on a panel session discussing Linked Data in the enterprise.

In terms of Wildlife Finder there are a few things that I wanted to highlight:

1. If you’re interested in the RDF and how we’re modelling the data we’ve documented the wildlife ontology here. In addition to the ontology itself we’ve also included some background on why we modelled the information in the way we have.
2. If you want to get you’re hands on the RDF/XML then either add .rdf to the end of most of our URLs (more on this later) or configure your client to request RDF/XML – we’ve implemented content negotiation so you’ll just get the data.
3. But… we’ve not implemented everything just yet. Specifically the adaptations aren’t published as RDF – this is because we’re making a few changes to the structure of this information and I didn’t want to publish the data and then change it. Nor have we published information on the species conservation status that’s simply because we’ve not finish yet (sorry).
4. It’s not all RDF – we are also marking-up our taxa pages with the species microformat which gives more structure to the common and scientific names.

Anyway I hope you find this useful.

The presentation is largely based upon the article Michael and I wrote for Nodalities this time last year.

"Semantic Web Rubik's Cube" by dullhunk. Some rights reserved.

TimBL is working with the UK Cabinet Office (as an advisor) to make our information more open and accessible on the web [cabinetoffice.gov.uk]
The blog states that he’s working on:

• overseeing the creation of a single online point of access and work with departments to make this part of their routine operations.
• helping to select and implement common standards for the release of public data
• developing Crown Copyright and ‘Crown Commons’ licenses and extending these to the wider public sector
• driving the use of the internet to improve consultation processes.
• working with the Government to engage with the leading experts internationally working on public data and standards

The Guardian has an article on the appointment.

Closer to home there have been a few interesting developments

Media Meets Semantic Web – How the BBC Uses DBpedia and Linked Data to Make Connections [pdf]
Our paper at this years European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC2009) looking at how the BBC has adopted semantic web technologies, including DBpedia, to help provide a better, more coherent user experience. For which we won best paper of the in-use track – congratulations to Silver and Georgie.

The BBC has announced a couple SPARQL endpoints, hosted by talis and openlink
Both platforms allow you to search and query the BBC data in a number of different ways, including SPARQL — the standard query language for semantic web data. If you’re not familiar with SPARQL, the Talis folk have published a tutorial that uses some NASA data.

A social semantic BBC?
Nice presentation from Simon and Ben on how social discovery of content could work… “show me the radio programmes my friends have listen to, show me the stuff my friends like that I’ve not seen” all built on people’s existing social graph. People meet content via activity.

PriceWaterhouseCooper’s spring technology forecast focuses on Linked Data [pwc.com]
“Linked Data is all about supply and demand. On the demand side, you gain access to the comprehensive data you need to make decisions. On the supply side, you share more of your internal data with partners, suppliers, and—yes—even the public in ways they can take the best advantage of. The Linked Data approach is about confronting your data silos and turning your information management efforts in a different direction for the sake of scalability. It is a component of the information mediation layer enterprises must create to bridge the gap between strategy and operations… The term “Semantic Web” says more about how the technology works than what it is. The goal is a data Web, a Web where not only documents but also individual data elements are linked.”

Including an interview with me!

You should also check out…

sameas.org a service to help link up equivalent URIs
It helps you to find co-references between different data sets. Interestingly it’s also licenced under CC0 which means all copyright and related or neighboring rights are waived.

Amazing render job by Alessandro Prodan

The open web

Does OpenID need to be hard? [factoryjoe.com]
Chris considers “the big fat stinking elephant in the room: OpenID usability and the paradox of choice” as usual it’s a good read.

I wonder whether restricting the OpenID providers displayed based on visited link would help? i.e. hide those that haven’t been visited? It clearly wouldn’t be perfect – Google isn’t my OpenID provider but I visit google.com lots, but it should cut down some of the clutter.

Security flaw leads Twitter, others to pull OAuth support [cnet.com]
The hole makes it possible for a hacker to use social-engineering tactics to trick users into exposing their data. The OAuth protocol itself requires tweaking to remove the vulnerability, and a source close to OAuth’s development team said that there have been no known violations, that it has been aware of it for a few days now, and has been coordinating responses with vendors. A solution should be announced soon.

Twitter and social networks

Relationship Symmetry in Social Networks: Why Facebook will go Fully Asymmetric [bokardo.com]
Asymmetric model better mimics how real attention works…and how it has always worked. Any person using Twitter can have a larger number of followers than followees, effectively giving them more attention than they give. This attention inequality is the foundation of the Twitter service… The IA of Facebook does not allow this. Facebook has designed a service that forces you to keep track of your friends, whether you want to or not. Facebook is modeling personal relationships, not relationships based on attention. That’s the crucial difference between Facebook and Twitter at the moment.

When Twitter Gets Weird… [Dave Gorman]
“The difference between following someone and replying to them is the difference between stopping to chat with someone in the street or giving them a badge declaring that you know them. One is actual interaction. The other is just something you can show your friends.” Blimey – Dave Gorman clearly has a much better grasp of life, the web and being a human than the two people who attacked him for not following them on Twitter. As Dave points out he hopes that Twiiter doesn’t descend into the MySpace “thanks for the add’ nonsense”. Me too.

Google profiles included in search results [googleblog]
A new “Profile results” section will appear at the bottom of a Google search page, when it finds a strong match in response to a name-based search. But only in the US. To help things along remember to use rel=me elsewhere (here’s how).

Shortlisted for a BAFTA, launch of clickable tracklistings and the start of BBC Earth

Look, look clickable tracklistings, w00t!
Few will every know the pain to get this useful little (cross domain) feature live.

We’ve been shortlisted for an Interactive Innovation BAFTA
The /programmes aka Automated Programme Support project. So proud.

Out of the Wild [bbc.co.uk]
Our first tentative steps towards improving the BBC’s online natural history offering. Out of The Wild seeks to bring you stories from BBC crews on location. Eventually this should all form part of an integrated programme offer.

Stuff

Biological Taxonomy Vocabulary
An RDF vocabulary for the taxonomy of all forms of life.

On url shorteners [joshua.schachter.org]
Joshua Schachter considers the issues associated with URL shortening. Similar argument to the one I put forward in “The URL shortening antipattern” but with some useful recommendations: “One important conclusion is that services providing transit (or at least require a shortening service) should at least log all redirects, in case the shortening services disappear. If the data is as important as everyone seems to think, they should own it. And websites that generate very long URLs, such as map sites, could provide their own shortening services. Or, better yet, take steps to keep the URLs from growing monstrous in the first place.”

Linked Data is a grassroots project to use web technologies to expose data on the web. It is for many people  synonymous with the semantic web – and while this isn’t quite true. It does, as far as I’m concerned, represent a very large subset of the semantic web project. Interestingly, it can also be thought of as the ‘the web done right’, the web as it was originally designed to be.

But what is it?

Well it can be described with 4 simple rules.

1. Use URIs to identify things not only documents

The web was designed to be a web of things with documents making assertions about those real-world things. Just as a passport or driving license, in the real world, can be thought of as providing an identifier for a person making an assertion about who they are, so URIs can be thought of as providing identifiers for people, concepts or things on the web.

Minting URIs for things rather than pages helps make the web more human literate because it means we are identifying those things that people care about.

2. Use HTTP URIs – they are globally unique and anyone can dereference them

The beauty of the web is its ubiquitous nature – it is decentralised and able to function on any platform. This is because of TimBL’s key invention the HTTP URI.

URI’s are globally unique, open to all and decentralised. Don’t go using DOI or any other identifier – on the web all you need is an HTTP URI.

3. Provide useful information [in RDF] when someone looks up a URI

And obviously you need to provide some information at that URI. When people dereference it you need to give them some data – ideally as RDF as well as HTML. Providing the data as RDF means that machines can process that information for people to use. Making it more useful.

4. Include links to other URIs to let people discover related information

And of course you also need to provide links to other resources so people can continue their journey, and that means contextual links to other resources elsewhere on the web, not just your site.

And that’s it.

Pretty simple really and other than the RDF bit, I would argue that these principles should be followed for any website – they just make sense.

But why?

Before the Web people still networked their computers – but to access those computers you needed to know about the network, the routing and the computers themselves.

For those in their late 30s you’ll probably remember the film War Games – because this was written before the Web had been invented David and Jennifer the two ‘hackers’ had to find and connect directly to each computer; they had to know about the computer’s location.

War Games, 1983

The joy of the web is that it adds a level of abstraction – freeing you from the networking, routing and server location – it lets you focus on the document.

Following the principles of Linked Data allows us to add a further level of abstraction – freeing us from the document and letting us focus on the things, people and stuff that matters to people. It helps us design a system that is more human literate, and more useful.

This is possible because we are identifying real world stuff and the relationships between them.

Free information from data silos

Of course there are other ways of achieving this – lots of sites now provide APIs which is good just not great. Each of those APIs tend to be proprietary and specific to the site. As a result there’s an overhead every time someone wants to add that data source.

These APIs give you access to the silo – but the silo still remains. Using RDF and Linked Data means there is a generic method to access data on the web.

What are we doing at the BBC?

First up it’s worth pointing out the obvious: the BBC is a big place and so it would be wrong to assume that everything we’re doing online is following these principles. But there’s quite a lot of stuff going on that does.

We do have – BBC’s programme support, music discovery and, soon, natural history content all adopting these principles. In other words persistent HTTP URIs that can be dereferenced to HTML, RDF, JSON and mobile views for programmes, artists, species and habitats.

We want HTTP URIs for every concept, not HTML webpage – an individual page is made up of multiple resource, multiple concepts. So for example an artist page transcludes the resource ‘/:artist/news’ and ‘/:artist/reviews’ – but those resources also have their own URIs. If they didn’t they wouldn’t be on the web.

Also because there’s only one web we only have one URI for a resource but a number of different representation for that resource. So the URI for the proggramme ‘Nature’s Great Events’ is:

bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00ht655#programme

Through content negotiation we will able to server an HTML, RDF, or mobile document to represent that programme.

We then need to link all of this stuff up within the BBC. So that, for example, you can go from a tracklist on an episode page of Jo Whiley on the Radio 1 site to the U2 artist page and then from there to all episodes of Chris Evans which have played U2. Or from an episode of Nature’s Great Events to the page about Brown Bears to all BBC TV programmes about Brown Bears.

But obviously the BBC is only one corner of the web. So we also need to link with the rest of the web.

Because we’re now thinking on a webscale we’ve started to think about the web as a CMS.

Where URIs already exist to represent that concept we are using it rather than minting our own. The new music site transcludes and links back to Wikipedia to provide biographical information about an artist. Rather than minting our own URI for artist biographic info we use Wikipedia’s.

Likewise when we want to add music metadata to the music site we add MusicBrainz.

Ben Seagal, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Calliau with TimBL's original proposal and first webserver at the WWW@20 celebrations, CERN

Semantic web news

Linked Data? Web of Data? Semantic Web? WTF? [Tom Heath]
“Think about HTML documents; when people started weaving these together with hyperlinks we got a Web of documents. Now think about data. When people started weaving individual bits of data together with RDF triples (that expressed the relationship between these bits of data) we saw the emergence of a Web of data. Linked Data is no more complex than this – connecting related data across the Web using URIs, HTTP and RDF.”

The Programmes Ontology [BBC]
Yves has updated the programmes ontology to handle “temporal annotations” tracklistings and segments and outlets etc.

Twitter news

The Twitter Global Mind [Rocketboom]
Don’t understand what all the fuss about Twitter? Watch this. Yes it’s about social networking and communication but it’s also about realtime search.

Twitter to begin charging brands for commercial use [Brand Republic News]
Co-founder Biz Stone told Marketing: ‘We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them. We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts.’ He would not be drawn on the level of charges.

Some interesting visualisations

Depressing Project of the Day: Stock Market, Set to Music with Microsoft Songsmith [Create Digital Music]
Thanks to Yves. The failing economy set to music.

Periodic Table of Typefaces on the Behance Network [behance.net]
“The Periodic Table of Typefaces is obviously in the style of all the thousands of over-sized Periodic Table of Elements posters hanging in schools and homes around the world. This particular table lists 100 of the most popular, influential and notorious typefaces today. As with traditional periodic tables, this table presents the subject matter grouped categorically. The Table of Typefaces groups by families and classes of typefaces: san-serif, serif, script, blackletter, glyphic, display, grotesque, realist, didone, garalde, geometric, humanist, slab-serif and mixed.”

The open web

What is the Open Platform? [guardian.co.uk]
“The Open Platform is the suite of services that make it possible for guardian.co.uk to build applications with the Guardian…” very nice, I hope others follow. I also wish the Beeb recognized it’s open projects (recognized internally that is).

RadioAunty feature update – twitter, scheduling and much more [whomwah]
RadioAunty is Mac app that allows you to listen to live and catchup BBC Radio. It’s a lovely app and is built on an open BBC platform :)

Monty Python DVD sales soar thanks to YouTube clips [guardian.co.uk]
“Within days of the launch of the official Monty Python YouTube channel, sales of the DVD box set had gone up by 16,000% on Amazon”

Designing for your least able user [BBC Radio Labs]
Michael’s mighty post on SEO, accessibility and the joy of links. Read it.

I’ve also posted some photos of the event up on Flickr.

—-

Telling (non-linear) stories

For the past 86 years the BBC has plied its trade as a storytelling organisation. In the world of linear broadcasting we’ve even gotten very good at it. Guiding the audience through complex news story lines, explaining the natural world and, interleaved narrative arcs and the plotlines of  drama  has become our forte. But storytelling in a linear world is different from storytelling in the non-linear, hypertext world of the web.

With the exception of BBC News Online (news.bbc.co.uk) the online world has often been seen as a supporting adjunct to the linear broadcast world. Over the years we’ve commissioned and built sites to provide online support for programmes; but we’ve too often taken our linear storytelling expertise and attempted to replicate the same techniques on the web – with mixed success. Unlike linear broadcast storylines the web doesn’t provide people with a predicted and controlled linear journey. Instead we dip in and out of any given website — following different journeys — to find the information we want at that time.

Many of our programme support sites have been commissioned and developed in isolation. So you see an Archers site and an Eastenders site and a Top Gear site which are internally coherent but which fail to link up other than via editorially determined cross promotions. Want to see who presents Top Gear? No problem, we can do that. Want to see what else those people present? Sorry, can’t do that. By developing self-contained microsites the BBC has produced some good stuff but it has also been unable to reach its full potential because it hasn’t managed to join up all of its resources. By failing to link up the content (on both a data and a user experience level) the stuff we publish can never becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Without these links we can’t make bbc.co.uk a coherent experience. As a user, it’s very difficult to find everything the BBC has published about any given subject, nor can you easily navigate across BBC domains following a particular semantic thread. For example, you can’t yet navigate from a page about a musician to a page with all the programmes that have played that artist.

So how do you tell stories on a web scale? We could stick with the easy option and try to control ‘user journeys’ across the site. Provide links to where we think the user should go next. But that’s little better than those flip a dice, go to page 30 dungeons and dragons books we all had as kids. We had to recognise that non-linear storytelling puts the narrative arc into the hands of the user. What to read, what to click, where to go next is really up to you. So storylines split and merge, meta-narratives emerge and fracture; ‘user journeys’ slip out of (editorial) control.

All of this comes from the power of the link – back to basics. But we can only provide precisely targeted links at the user experience level if those links exist at a data level. And that’s the difficult part. The organic growth of our sites has been mirrored in the organic growth of our content and data management systems. We currently have a range of systems across the business for managing different bits of content throughout the production chain. And like our public facing sites none of these speak the same language or share the same identifiers. A typical episode of Top Gear might have 6 separate identifiers on it’s way from scriptwriter to airwaves to archive. Once you’ve solved this problem you hit the problem of multiple identifiers for James May and once you’ve got one canonical James May you’re back to the problem of multiple identifiers for all the other programmes he’s presented…

Solving these problems makes for a more linked, more coherent bbc.co.uk. But an internally coherent bbc.co.uk isn’t enough. bbc.co.uk needs to be weaved into the rest of the web, not merely on the web. It needs to be linked in to all those other Top Gear / James May pages out there… Luckily the tips, tricks and techniques pioneered by the Linked Data community give us some clues here.

Add into this mix the fact that there’s some data the BBC can never hope to provide. So we know when an artist is played on radio or TV. But we can’t hope to know when they were born, or where they were born, or which bands they’ve been in, or who they’re married to etc. If we want to tell stories around music all this is important data. And we can only get it by tapping into the collective knowledge of the web.

BBC in the web of data

I’d like to claim that when we set out to develop /programmes we had the warm embrace of the semantic web in mind. But that would be a lie. We were however building on very similar philosophical foundations.

In the work leading up to bbc.co.uk/programmes we were all too aware of the importance of persistent web identifiers, permanent URIs and the importance of links as a way to build meaning. To achieve all this we broke with BBC tradition by designing from the domain model up rather than the interface down. The domain model provided us with a set of objects (brands, series, episodes, versions, ondemands, broadcasts etc) and their sometimes tangled interrelationships.

We were also convinced that the value in programme websites lay not in the implicit metadata of the domain model but rather in the way this domain model overlapped and intersected with other domains. As ever the links are more important than the nodes because that’s where the context lives: programmes:segment <features> music:track, programmes:segment <features> food:recipe etc. In this way we could weave new ‘user journeys’ into and out of /programmes, into and out of bbc.co.uk. From archive episodes no longer available online, to a recipe page, to a chef, to another recipe and back to a recent episode. Using well targeted content specific links we could not only escape the dead end content silos that characterised bbc.co.uk but point users back to programmes that would hopefully inform, educate and of course entertain.

Finally we believed in the merits of opening our data and building on top of other people’s open data. When we looked to rebuild bbc.co.uk/music we looked at a number of commercial providers of music metadata. They all did a similar job to MusicBrainz (musicbrainz.org) – similar models, similar data quality etc. But choosing to go with a commercial provider would have precluded our ability to provide any kind of machine friendly (API if you must) views. The decision to publish JSON or vanilla XML or RDF would have been a decision to give the 3rd party business model away. So we went with the open alternative – an open, public domain provider, one that is more in keeping with  our public service remit and one that represents better value for money for the license fee payer – which has to be a lesson to someone.

Without ever explicitly talking RDF we’d built a site that complied with Tim Berners-Lee’s four principles for Linked Data:

1. Use URIs as names for things. – CHECK
2. Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names. – CHECK
3. When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information. – Well, if we’re only talking HTML, RSS, ATOM, JSON etc. CHECK
4. Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover more things. – Again if we’re talking HTML only CHECK

By keeping everything in its right place we’d also built a sane, maintainable, scalable, accessible site that search engines love and could be easily evolved to add new features and functionality. So to anyone considering how best to build websites we’d recommend you throw out the Photoshop and embrace Domain Driven Design and the Linked Data approach every time. Even if you never intend to publish RDF it just works.

Around this time we met by chance with some people from the Linking Open Data community and the two worlds collided. Obviously TBL wasn’t talking only HTML in the last 2 principles but aside from that the parallels were striking. We set about converting our programmes domain model into an RDF ontology which we’ve since published under a Creative Commons License (www.bbc.co.uk/ontologies/programmes/). Which took one person about a week. The trick here isn’t the RDF mapping – it’s having a well thought through and well expressed domain model. And if you’re serious about building web sites that’s something you need anyway. Using this ontology we began to add RDF views to /programmes (e.g. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00f91wz.rdf). Again the work needed was minimal.

So for those considering the Linked Data approach we’d say that 95% of the work is work you should be doing just to build for the (non-semantic) web. Get the fundamentals right and the leap to the Semantic Web is really more of a hop.

Why bother with RDF?

For all the pages we’ve published we’ve only had a limited success at making this information available for others to use, to hack with and to build new services with. While we’ve not done a very good job of making bbc.co.uk a coherent experience for people the situation is worse for machines.

It is our belief that rather than publishing proprietary APIs it is better to use the ubiquitous technologies of URIs and HTTP. This approach supports the generative nature of the Web, making it easy for third parties to build with BBC metadata without learning BBC specific APIs and at the same time providing the BBC and its users with immediate benefits.

Services like Flickr, Twitter and the like have in many, many ways followed the same principles we adopted for programmes and music — or if they didn’t then the end results look pretty similar — they are wonderful services. However, if as a third party developer you want to deal with the semantics, accessing the data via the Giant Global Graph to find everything about a certain person, place or topic and you wanted to include data from Flickr then you will need to deal with the specifics of Flickr. I suspect that it wouldn’t be that difficult for Flickr to add RDF representations – if they did then Flickr content would be part of a common way of doing things. We want BBC data to be part of a common way of doing things.

Our hope in making BBC data available as RDF is that we will make it as generative as possible – helping others to do interesting things with our data. The BBC has a public service remit, a remit that means it should look beyond its internal business needs to help create public value around useful technologies and around its content for others to benefit from. The longer term aim of this work is to not only expose BBC data but to ensure that it is contextually linked to the wider web. We have started along this path by linking to Wikipedia (DBpedia in the RDF view) and MusicBrainz from the artist pages but this could be extended for programmes and events.

Coffee Shop Study by notashamed. Some rights reserved

As anyone that reads this blog will realise I’m a bit of of Linked Data nut. I believe that the future of web design lies not in webpages but in URLs and resources. If you’re not sure what I’m on about then I suggest you read Tim Berners Lee’s article on the Giant Global Graph or Tom Coates’s presentation Native to the Web of Data.

I and the teams working on BBC programmes and music believe that the web is wonderful because of links — because people can go on journeys of discovery, browsing by meaning — by following links to the things that interest them. We also believe that where existing webscale identifiers exist or where existing ontologies, taxonomies and metadata exists we should reuse those and link to them. This focus on URLs and resources, and existing services has meant the services that we’ve been building are a bit different, as we’ve stated previously:

A core feature of the site is the integration with external services – notably MusicBrainz and Wikipedia. We are using these services to provide core information (discographies, biographical information, membership etc) about artists and releases. We are then combining this data with information from within the BBC – including details about which BBC programmes have played that artist.

The use of community, non-BBC, maintained databases obviously means that much of the data the BBC is publishing on bbc.co.uk/music/beta comes from external services. But what may not be immediately obvious is that the BBC isn’t forking this data, as others have done. Because that would be silly.

So if we want to create a new artist, or edit any of this content then rather than editing that data via some internal CMS we edit MusicBrainz or Wikipedia. Just like you or anyone else, as Nick puts it:

From now on if I want to indulge my love of Frank Sinatra, I’ll just edit the Wikipedia page, knowing it will turn up on the BBC. Collaboration is the future, and not just in music.

Indeed with MusicBrainz we’ve been actively contributing content since June 2007.

[...] In exchange, MusicBrainz receives a monthly license fee that will allow MetaBrainz to hire some engineering help in the coming months to work on new features and to improve the existing infrastructure. This is quite significant since MusicBrainz has been resource constrained for many months now — having paid people on staff will ensure a more reasonable amount of progress moving forward.

Even cooler, the BBC online music editors will soon participate in the MusicBrainz community contributing their knowledge to MusicBrainz. The goal is to have the BBC /music editorial team round out and add new information to MusicBrainz as they need to use it in their MusicBrainz enabled applications internally.

As of today the BBC music team has contributed over 2,800 edits to MusicBrainz. None of this is to say that we don’t need content management solutions for our own, internal (meta)data we clearly do, but it does means that a significant proportion of these services are drawing on data from elsewhere on the web, and that means that if we want to edit it we edit the web improving those services and those provided by the BBC (including search).

My most popular photo on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

Here then are the most popular posts from the last 12 months (most popular first):

Web design 2.0 – it’s all about the resource and its URL — thanks to Simon Willison this is my most popular post of all time and of 2008.

QR codes for BBC programmes and some other stuff — a lunchtime of hacking from the wonderful Duncan Robertson gave us QR Codes for every BBC programme.

When agile projects become mini waterfalls — I have no idea why this is so popular, but there you go.

Interesting BBC data to hack with — the release of XML views of Radio AOD data, unsurprisingly, proved popular.

The all new BBC music site where programmes meet music and the semantic web — the first hint at what the BBC will be able to do by caring about its URLs, Linked Data and Domain Driven Design. If you put everything in the right place you can join it all up and create a coherent user experience. 

Osmotic communication – keeping the whole company in touch — I still think this is a good idea.

Find and Play BBC Programmes — announcing the embedded media player on programme pages — meaning all BBC programme support sites now include the latest TV and Radio media.

iPhoto photos not appearing in Front Row — how to fix iPhoto’s album.xml file when you migrate from Google’s Picasa to iPhoto. The fact this is still proving popular implies Apple still haven’t fixed the bug. 

Highly connected graphs: Opening BBC data — in response to Mike Butcher’s post on TechCrunch requesting the BBC open up their data and provide APIs I thought it worth pointing out there’s already some good stuff going on.

Ladies and gentlemen I give you BBC Programmes — the launch of a page for every programme the BBC broadcasts.

UGC its rude, its wrong and it misses the point — its still rude and it still means those that think of amateur publishers in these terms will continue to miss opportunities.

So there you have it. It’s been a good year and as I’ve discussed previously I’m very proud of what we’ve achieved, as reflected in many of these posts and the fact the Guardian also cover the work — which also had the added bonus that my parents finally have some idea of what I do for a living.