The Bangladesh River Journey, a BBC World Service project to track climate change, for which we built the interactive mini-site, has recently received two prestigious awards. These awards recognise the innovative way that the project brought social media reporting on important global issues into an engaging user-experience.

Webby Honoree

The Webby Awards are like the Oscars for the Web. From nearly 10,000 entries, the Bangladesh River Journey was declared a Webby Honoree, “in recognition of outstanding work”.

Sony Radio Academy Awards

At the Sony Radio Academy Awards (“the Oscars for Radio”), the Bangladesh Boat Project won the Multiplatform Radio Award. That’s a photo of the award at the top of this post.

The awards body said:

This is a project that from the very outset was designed to make the most of the multiplatform landscape. It embraced everything from podcasts to GPS and Googlemaps to add value to the listener/user experience and met those listeners where they really lived using third party sites such as Flickr.

This is [...] about creativity and using the plethora of multimedia options now available to generate something unique and uniquely valuable. This is absolutely the paradigm for an interactive radio project in the current landscape and is by far the deserved winner.

These awards are testament to the bold, creative approach of the World Service and the well-knit collaboration within their team. It was a really exciting project to be involved with.

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.