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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:

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.