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BBC World Service Widget Launched

Premasagar — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 10:05:32 +0000

We recently completed an exciting project for BBC World Service: the World Service Widget, which lets people share BBC World Service content on their websites, blogs or computer desktops.

It's being released on a number of web platforms (WordPress, iGoogle, Adobe Air, Facebook, Netvibes, Mac Dashboard, Vista Sidebar and as a simple snippet of HTML code). These are being rolled out over the coming days.

The widget is available in a multitude of different languages and content networks. (This was one of the trickiest aspects of development - although there were other, perhaps even stickier issues). Below, for example, are the English and Farsi flavours. (Farsi is the language spoken in Iran. It is written right-to-left, and it has a special widget: click on a news story to open the "Lightbox" window).

We've already started thinking about what the widget could do better, so do tell us your thoughts.

English:

Farsi:

Basecamp. A Project Manager’s Friend.

Ben Sauer — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 11:47:00 +0000

How many hours of your life have you spent rifling through emails and looking for all the bits associated with projects? And how often have you been cc’d into an email that was only marginally relevant to your work? If you’re into managing projects and keeping things together, then Basecamp is your friend. Basecamp is an online project-management system that keeps all of your project's communications in one place. It comes with both paid and free packages, and while there are some excellent alternative tools out there, we find it one of the easiest to use. Recently, Ben Sauer used it to manage our work with BBC World Service on the Talking America project. Here, he explains why he is a self-professed 'Basecamp fanatic'... - Premasagar

How it changed the way I work

While working at my former company as a producer/director, we found that Basecamp transformed our business as soon as we started using it. We loved it, and so did our clients. Before that, in the dark days, most of the decision-making and knowledge was buried in emails several replies deep. Since then, I have lived by a philosophy of minimal email.

The magic of Basecamp lies in commitment

Over time, I've become a Basecamp fanatic. Having an online project management system enables a new way of working, providing a central hub for all action points, project milestones, decisions and communications. To make the system a success, anything discussed outside of Basecamp needs to be added back in. For example, points covered in phone conversations and meetings. People do sometimes need reminding to use it, and anything outside of Basecamp needs to be put in - including action points, milestones and the points covered in telephone calls. If someone in a team sends a group email instead of using Basecamp, I will usually copy the email into a new thread in Basecamp. This might seem pedantic, but the truth is that the system is only useful if you stick to it. It devalues very quickly if communications fall outside of it.

Opting out and dipping in

Things are made easier by the way that Basecamp integrates email. You can choose to have email notifications of new messages and, if you reply via email, your message will simply be added to the Basecamp thread. Whenever someone feels that their attention is not required, they can opt out of notifications. On the BBC project, I hardly ever included the top decision-maker in email notifications. Any time that he wanted to see how things were going, he could just log into the system.

Working with clients

I have seen a shift in the way that teams work together once they start using a system like Basecamp. For Talking America, the World Service jumped in head-first. They understand that it brings greater transparency, and more efficient issue management and knowledge transfer. We use Basecamp with most of our clients. Even if there is a slight learning curve, it's worth it because we get to spend more time on the projects and less on administration. If you’re interested in learning more about Basecamp, if you’re a project manager and you've used it before, or if you have another system for project management that works well for you, then we’d love to hear your thoughts.

Live! We’re Tracking a Big Bus with the BBC

Premasagar — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:41:21 +0000

URL: bbc.co.uk/worldservice/talkingamerica Excitingly, not long after we built the award-winning Bangladesh River Journey mini-site for the BBC World Service, we were asked for another helping of social media expertise.

What is it?

Talking America is a trail-blazing social media campaign that we're proud to have worked on. This time, it's a live site that tracks the World Service crew as they journey across America in a social media bus. Their big aim? In the eloquent words of Ros Atkins:

"This bus trip is our attempt to paint a detailed picture of America ahead of the election in November. We also want to create conversations between Americans and everyone else..."

(Ros Atkins, BBC crew member on the Talking America bus).

What you can do with social media

Talking America uses maps, pictures, video, audio podcasts, blog posts and other user-generated snippets to bring a journey alive. In this case, we built a mini content-management system for the journalists, with a system to pull in the latest Flickr photos from the bus and a colourful map to display it all. In charming technological terms, we call it a "geo-mashup." Namely, a smooth way of automatically pulling together time and location-based information into one online multimedia bundle. The outcome of this is the ability to track the reporters over time and in different contexts.

A bit for the technically brained

The mapping application uses jQuery and Sumo, which is a JavaScript microformats parser written by Dan Webb, who also worked on the front-end of the site. If you look at the site without JavaScript, you'll see that all the info is already present on the page, written up in microformats and ready to be plotted on the map. And they're off...

HackHUD

Premasagar — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 17:52:24 +0000

Well, this one didn't get blogged yet... Back in June, we stayed up all night at the BBC / Yahoo Hack Day in London. The task was to combine data sources and build something experimental - and a little bit edgy. We forged a script to enhance mainstream news sites (such as BBC News) with a layer of grassroots community content - from bloggers, photographers, and the like. The idea was to propagate the news and views from the streets, alongside mainstream media. The result: 'HackHUD'. It's a Greasemonkey userscript and it uses a number of Yahooey things (Pipes, YUI and Term Extraction), to display content from Flickr, Technorati and Newsvine. We were clackety-clack on the keyboard, non-stop for over 24 hours. There were tears and laughter... and in the end, a prize. » The HackHUD Project » Install the script (quickly, before the BBC redesign their site ;)

Changelog

0.16 - Public release.
0.17 - Problem with Flickr photos fixed.
0.181 - Wikipedia and Twitter options added.
0.2 - Updated to accommodate changes to BBC site & to Greasemonkey.
0.21 - Better handling of multi-word tags.

Climate Change in Social Media

Premasagar — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 18:28:02 +0000

I am afraid it is no exaggeration to say that what we saw was a hellish scene. [source]

It has been a sobering experience to see reports of the Bangladesh cyclone - and to watch them flow through the Bangladesh River Journey site we built for BBC World Service. The project's original aim was to expose the very real presence of climate change in Bangladesh - a low-lying land of myriad rivers - and the cyclone's arrival seemed shockingly symbolic. While news of the cyclone competed for airtime in the general media, the World Service maintained a stream of often very personal and touching accounts from the Bangladeshi people. Their Flickr photos and Twitter texts acted as informal media channels, adding an extra dimension to the more formal reporting on the World Service website and radio.

Social Media News

This year, the World Service are celebrating 75 years of global media broadcasting. They, and the BBC in general, are about to launch a major website redesign and there is a conscious effort to embrace new media techniques, such as microformats, APIs, social networking and open content. What is the future for news reporting through social media? Is there greater or less authenticity in such reporting? Share your thoughts below...

BBC Bangladesh River Journey

Premasagar — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 14:00:32 +0000

URL: www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/bangladeshboat Phew! We've been busy these last three weeks! From commission to launch in just 12 working days (and nights), Dharmafly has built a site for the BBC that explores social media and cutting edge Web technologies... The Bangladesh River Journey is a mashup of posts from a BBC World Service trip to track the effects of climate change in Bangladesh. The trip lasts a month, with photos being posted to Flickr, messages sent to Twitter and journal entries made on the World Service site. The mashup puts all these posts on to a map, letting you navigate around and follow the trip. The journalists are equipped with a GPS navigation device. Each time they visit a new location, they post their co-ordinates to the Twitter stream (e.g. this post). Our system then logs the coordinates and applies them to every photo, tweet and diary entry until the next location. In addition to what you see in the browser, there are a number of gems hidden under the hood: microformats, geoRSS and an API. (Non-techie folk may happily skip this and proceed straight to comments :)

Microformats

Microformats are new, developing standards for adding extra meaning to the HTML of a web page. They create all sorts of possibilities for software (from search engines to browsers) to interact with the content in innovative and useful ways. The HTML for each Twitter, Flickr and diary post in the Bangladesh River Journey is written using the hAtom microformat. This means, for example, that an RSS feed can be generated directly from the HTML on the page. If you use the Firefox browser, you can explore other microformats on the Bangladesh Boat site, with the excellent Operator extension. You'll find xFolk bookmarks, geo locations, hCalendar events, hCard contacts, xoxo lists and tagged links:

GeoRSS

The site's RSS feed allows users to stay up-to-date with new posts, without needing to re-visit the site (we talked about using RSS in a previous post). The feed is encoded with the geo coordinates of each post (this is called GeoRSS). Some interesting things can then be done with the feed, such as plotting it straight on to Google Maps:

API

Part of the task was to build an API - a way for web developers to access the data in the system, to create their own mashup applications. This will be promoted through BBC Backstage - the BBC's hub for exploring new media technology. More about this soon... Update: The Bangladesh River Journey API is now live on BBC Backstage. Inspired by Google's addition of a Greasemonkey API to Gmail (via), we added an experimental Greasemonkey API to the Bangladesh River Journey site. Update: We added KML as a data format to the API. This allows you, for example, to view the entire journey of posts in mapping applications like Google Earth.

Dharmafly & the BBC

It has been fantastic working with the BBC crew. Everyone has shown their good-nature and team-spirit... and nothing but excitement for exploring new forms of media in reporting events that matter to the world. Our own team was:

Me, as technical director and coder of HTML, JavaScript and additional CSS
Annesley, who authored the rock-solid PHP / XSL back-end
Pete, who scripted the water-tight CSS theme
Mikel, who contributed mapping strategy and the out-of-the-box balloons

With thanks to Toby Travis, for JavaScript inspiration.

Update: This Project Won Awards

14th May, 2008 The Bangladesh River Journey was declared a Webby Awards Honoree and won the Sony Radio Multiplatform Award. See our later blog post for more information.