William Burroughs' Naked Lunch as an Historical Document | Reality Studio

Interesting essay on Naked Lunch, William S Burrough's most well known novel. I'm looking forward to checking out the article when I get a moment, so this post is basically just a placeholder and link.

William Burroughs' Naked Lunch as an Historical Document

In the mean time, posted here more because in it I see shadows of my own country in recent times than as a commentary on the U.S...

A Thanksgiving Prayer, by William S. Burroughs

For John Dillinger
In hope he is still alive
Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1986

Thanks for the wild turkey and the Passenger Pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts

thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison —

thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger —

thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin, leaving the carcass to rot —

thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes —

thanks for the AMERICAN DREAM to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through —

thanks for the KKK, for nigger-killing lawmen feeling their notches, for decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces —

thanks for "Kill a Queer for Christ" stickers —

thanks for laboratory AIDS —

thanks for Prohibition and the War Against Drugs —

thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business —

thanks for a nation of finks — yes, thanks for all the memories... all right, let's see your arms... you always were a headache and you always were a bore —

thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.

He always was such a happy guy...

Holographic-memory discs may put DVDs to shame | New Scientist

Don't forget, you heard it here first (other than all those other places that mentioned it. 33rd at most...)

Back in July the editorial team here at King Leonard - The Weblog made mention of Holographic storage as a new technology coming through to trump the bipartisan debacle that is HDVD/Blu-Ray. New Scientist reports that the first commercial product should be available at the end of next year.

"The discs... hold 300 gigabytes of data and can be used to read and write data 10 times faster than a normal DVD.
...the technique could theoretically be used to store up to 1.6 terabytes of data on the same size of disc and to read data at 120 megabits per second. This is 340 times the capacity of an ordinary DVD and 20 times the data rate."

New Scientist Breaking News - Holographic-memory discs may put DVDs to shame

A new kind of Vlog | Chasing Windmills

What is it about Minnesota in the U.S.? Is this state the innovation capital for video weblogs? Heaven knows there's enough of them.

Minnesota Stories | Secret Vlog Injection | Green, Green Water
Super Adventures TV | DigElogROCORI | jadelr's notebook
My Stories of Life | Starfire TV

A few thoughts on what I find so great about this. For the last ten or fifteen years we've been told, usually by marketing types and venture capitalists, that the internet is a global phenomenon, that a tiny shop in a small town can suddenly get access to customers around the world. Suddenly you have the ability to realise communities based on common interests rather than geography.

Fact is, we are kind of tied to our geography. It goes with being physical entities. So I find it wonderful that there has been a reminder in the last year or so that the internet is also a great way of communicating and sharing common content in smaller, geographically based communities. That's what I find so interesting about this scene. The people involved are happy to promote and assist each other, creating content that is of specific interest to a core community, with the added advantage of also being available to the rest of us.

On her personal weblog Amanda Congdon of Rocketboom fame made some comments regarding the state of vlogs, in particular personal vlogs. In her opinion (and I have to say I kind of agree) the sort of content we tend to see now ("A lot of the video blogs out there are by someone in their bedroom, half-awake.") will not be very palatable to a mainstream audience.

In other words, the majority of video weblogs (a genre still in its infancy with a HUGE potential) are just people making content for other vloggers. That's why it's nice to see something different.

Chasing Windmills is a semi-daily guerilla style series of short pieces, kind of half drama, half reality show, about a young urban couple that's starting to push what the genre can achieve. I have to say from the outset the stories don't really appeal to me but I find it enthralling to see the genre develop in this way. More power to jadelr and Christina Cordova for trying something beyond the norm.

Hang Up and Drive | Wired News

Social Commentary time, kiddies...

Praise be to Tony Long, copy chief for Wired News, for telling it like it is!

"One of the things that makes riding a motorcycle so dangerous is that the people out there in their cars don't see you. It's the first thing they tell you in motorcycle school: "Remember, drivers don't see you."

The instructors should consider adding another warning: "They don't hear you, either, because they're too busy yapping on their cell phones when they should be paying attention to what's going on around them." "


If you even occasionally feel like you need to make a phone call while driving a car, read this article and get it through your skull; PULL OVER AND GET OUT OF THE WAY! The road is an inherently dangerous place as it is without someone yapping away in a runaway metal and plastic missile.

Wired News: Hang Up and Drive

Minnesota Stories | Family

Today's Minnesota Stories has an interesting piece on recording personal histories, in particular the history of your family. While it's a bit saccharin in places (as is to be expected when dealing with loved ones your audience doesn't know) it makes a strong point about the value of getting out your video camera and talking to your parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, anyone that can help tell the story of where you came from. With recording, production, distribution and archiving facilities in the hands of the everyday person now more than ever we have an opportunity to tell the personal stories that matter to us for future generations to look back on.

Now I'm getting saccharin.
:-)

Minnesota Stories: Daily Videoblog: Family

In a losing race with the zeitgeist | Los Angeles Times

Patrick Goldstein of the LA Times has some interesting things to say about the falling position of the cinema in todays media sphere, and about the executives in charge who seem even more separated from their consumers than ever before.

"Hollywood needs a new mindset, one that sees a movie as something that comes in all shapes and sizes, not something that is wedded to the big screen. Studios have to do what record companies refused to do until they nearly went out of business: embrace the future.

People increasingly want to see movies on their terms, today on a big TV at home, tomorrow on an iPod or cellphone. It breaks my heart that people have fallen out of love with movie theaters, but if I were king, I'd start releasing any movie with multi-generational appeal on DVD at the same time it hit theaters, so the kids could get out of the house and the parents could watch at home.

The music business has already adopted this two-tier system, selling downloads and CDs simultaneously. TV networks are starting to do the same thing with their shows. It's only a matter of time before movies are forced to do the same. The day isn't far away — desperation being a great motivator for innovation — when a studio opens a blockbuster on Friday in theaters and on Saturday on pay-per-view (at $75 a shot) so fans could watch it with a bunch of friends at home."

It will happen. I'm no fan of HD at this moment, but the fact is that will take over the top end of video distribution. When it does and the average punter has set up their own personal cinema room, complete with widescreen or projector, surround sound system and comfy chairs, what need do they have for going out and paying all that money? Despite today's symbolic victory over download movie piracy (As Warren Ellis points out, "This would be because bittorrent.com’s search engine is shite and no-one uses it, surely?"), the more they try and clamp down on maintaining antiquated models of distribution the easier they make it for the pirates to exist. Until you start following the "Path of Least Resistance from Total Boredom" and giving users the ability to consume your product ON THEIR TERMS then you're just making trouble for yourself.

They'll get there. And those that don't will make a song and dance about the death of cinema, and get all nostalgic and weepy about their film and cultural history, blaming everyone but themselves. Yeah, that's it. Blame someone else. It's the modern thing to do.

In a losing race with the zeitgeist - Los Angeles Times

FT.com - Murdoch and Trujillo in internet talks

The man whose company almost destroyed Firefly and the man who last week told us he'd shed 12,000 Australian jobs, got together to plan strategy (you'll notice that I hold the two events on an almost equal level of infamy).

Well, O.K., they just got together for a meet and greet, a cup of tea and some bikkies. Still, it's an interesting coming together of two very powerful men in the Australian Media/Telecommunications scene.

"The pair discussed the future of Foxtel, Australia’s dominant pay-TV platform in which Telstra has a 50 per cent stake and News Corp 25 per cent. Mr Trujillo has said he is keen for Foxtel to take advantage of technology to increase its market penetration.

However, both companies declined to give details of the outcome of the talks or what else was discussed.

Analysts believe they would likely have touched on the implications of Telstra’s announcement last week that it would launch a movie download service for broadband subscribers.

One analyst said: “The boundaries are being blurred so much it is hard to know what the opportunities are and for whom. Telstra needs movie content for its download services but, then again, Murdoch might be concerned that it could become a rival to Foxtel’s own movie services.” "

FT.com - Murdoch and Trujillo in internet talks

Star Wars: Episodes I-VI - The greatest postmodern art film ever | Slate.com

An interesting view on the entire series, now that we're able to sit and watch the six episodes back to back.

"As literary critics have long pointed out, the arbitrary yoking together of events in the service of storytelling is one of the fundamental characteristics of all narrative. R2-D2 needs to hook up with Luke on Tatooine, just as Prospero's enemies need to wash up on the shores of his island, and Elizabeth Bennet needs to marry Mr. Darcy, for the narrative requirements of those stories to be fulfilled. The audience's willing surrender to narrative coincidence is demanded by the story's need to conclude itself.

But Lucas takes this self-consciousness about narrative artifice a step further: He makes explicit his theoretical interest in the mechanics of plot. As viewers, we take pleasure in the implausible events that must happen for the narrative contraption to snap shut in a satisfying way. But the characters come to understand that there is another agent, external to themselves, that is dictating the action. Within the films' fiction, that force is called … er, "the Force." It's the Force that makes Anakin win the pod race so that he can get off Tatooine and become a Jedi and set all the other events in all of the other films in motion. We learn that Anakin's birth, fall, redemption, and death are required to "bring balance to the Force" and, not coincidentally, to give the story its dramatic shape. The Force is, in other words, a metaphor for, or figuration of, the demands of narrative. The Force is the power of plot."

Star Wars: Episodes I-VI - The greatest postmodern art film ever. By Aidan Wasley

Australian IT - Govt to fast-track digital TV

So Senator Coonan is thinking about subsidising the sale of digital set-top boxes so they can free up that bandwidth by 2008? Problem is, there's only so many boxes you can sell with the marketing line "purty pictures, great for a TV set you probably don't own yet."

Here's the problem, and it's no secret. People don't want to buy set top boxes because it's too expensive for what's extra to watch on it (other than ABC2, but as fond of it as I am it's just not enough to get the crowds pouring in), manufacturers don't want to make more because no one's buying them, and content providers don't want to make content because no one owns one.

Oh yeah, that and THE STUPID GENRE RESTRICTIONS IMPOSED BY THE GOVERNMENT BECAUSE THE COMMERCIALS WANT TO CLOG UP THE BANDWIDTH WITH HD!!!

Ahem. Sorry.

So anyway, now that it's become obvious to the government what should have been obvious to all from the start, they're looking into handing out set top boxes to get people off the analog service.

"There is the issue of how you would get a consortium of retailers, consumers, governments and broadcasters to plan the switch-off," Senator Coonan said yesterday.

"Because one of the problems we have got is that the market-driven model won't work unless you (provide incentives).

"(The issue is) whether or not (there is) a cost-benefit of continuing to pay for analogue-transmission simulcast or whether it would be more cost effective to give a box to people who haven't crossed over."

But even that won't work. Want to know why? Let's go back to Mark Cuban's "Path of Least Resistance from Total Boredom". The more obstacles you put in the way of people, the more they're likely to look elsewhere for entertainment. That's what a set-top box is, an obstacle. You want to sell digital TV? Provide incentives for manufacturers to build the tuner into the set so it's exactly the same as their old analog receiver. If manufacturers keep selling analog TV's, or digital TV's with no inbuilt tuner, why would you bother? Especially with the rather ridiculous rules regarding what can and can't be put in the available bandwidth. Heaven knows content won't be the bait, and if "the King" can't drag in the customers, what can?

"Senator Coonan stepped away from the possibility of allowing free-to-air television to broadcast on multiple channels and all but ended any hopes for a fourth free-to-air television licence, saying she did not think it would be commercially viable."

Well yeah, a fourth TV channel would be suicide with our population, but maintaining the clamp on multi-channeling just stymies innovation. Then again, it could be argued that having to think outside the box engenders innovation, but we all know that any new ideas are likely to get stomped on...

"...as part of a digital action plan that will be the subject of a broad discussion paper on new media rules to be released next month ahead of planned legislation later next year.

The paper will also canvas options for relaxing cross-media restrictions, foreign ownership, the spectrum for so-called data-casting services that become available in 2007 and changes to anti-siphoning rules...

"The paper will have a very short consultation period that now formalises the informal consultations that I have had with industry," Senator Coonan said yesterday. "

Short consultation period? Well, that doesn't come as a great surprise. We're kind of getting used to that.

Australian IT - Govt to fast-track digital TV (Michael Sainsbury, NOVEMBER 18, 2005)

Steve Garfield's Video Blog: Amanda Congdon at the Corante SSA

Video by Steve Garfield, one of the most prolific vloggers out there, of Amanda Congdon talking to the Corante Symposium on Social Architecture held at Harvard law School about Rocketboom and how they view the input of their viewers. An interesting few minutes, even if the audio is shot.

Steve Garfield's Video Blog: Amanda Congdon at the Corante SSA

:: Douglas Rushkoff - "Get Back In The Box" excerpts ::

Dougles Rushkoff prints excerpts from his upcoming book "Get Back In The Box." Links here so I can find them again easily in the future.

:: Thought Virus #1: One Thing ::

:: Thought Virus #2: Open Source and the Authorship Society ::

:: Thought Virus #3: Social Currency ::

:: Thought Virus #4: Follow the Fun ::

:: Thought Virus #5: The Ben & Jerry's Syndrome ::

:: Thought Virus #6: Brand as Communication ::

:: Final Thought Virus: It's Supposed to be Fun ::

"Quote"

Great quote from Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine regarding Sony and their continuing debacle over DRM.

"CD? What’s a CD? They’re working so hard to protect a dead medium. It’s as if they posted a militia around a graveyard."

BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Protecting a dead medium

A Tale of Two Broadband Speeds...

"Web 2.0 is broadband. Web 3.0 is 10 gigabits a second."

But I'm still getting used to this version of the web...

Anyway, Reed Hastings, chief executive of online DVD rental company Netflix made this statement at the TechNet Innovation Summit recently, according to Yahoo! News. According to Reed, we're going to be seeing homes connected to the net at whopping speeds of 10Gb/s, introducing a glorious world of unprecedented choice and freedom.

Internet still young, faster access to spur growth - Yahoo! News

Now for the flip side.

Same day as this comes out, we hear from our old pal, Mark Cuban.

Over the past 5 years, bandwidth to the home has grown from 300k for broadband to 5mbs, and in some cases even 10mbs. But that bandwidth is not dedicated per user. That bandwidth is shared. The number of users sharing that bandwidth has increased even faster than the size of the pipe. Thats not going to change...

So in a nutshell, at the very point in time when a rapidly growing number of consumers are going to be expecting programming at the highest possible High Definition bitrate, there isnt enough bandwidth to deliver it.

The Coming Golden Age of Television - Blog Maverick

So which one do we believe? More to come no doubt.

dot mobile - Celebrated literary works as text messages

Things that amuse me vol. 2.

A U.K. company intends to start texting extremely compressed synopses of favourite literature works, purely for educational purposes of course.

"The scheme, which will be available from January 2006 offers dot subscribers concise summaries of classic works of literature in text format. The new service has been specifically designed to aid English students in both their choices of books to study and to serve as a valuable revision tool for exams.

The texts which are sent directly to subscribers handsets have been developed in consultation with Professor John Sutherland and his students exclusively for dot mobile and succeed in translating complex plots and quotes into easy to digest messages or little more than three or four lines of text."

Don't believe it? Check out some of these classics...

William Golding, Lord Of The Flies
NuclearWar-2boysRalph&PigyFormGrup2reviveOldCultr.Jack-oposnLeadrTaksR'sSuportersAway. MystryBeastOnIslandCauzsPanicBtSimonFindsOutTisOnlyAParachute.Jtries2kilRbtR's savd ByShipDat c's emergncySmoke.


John Milton, Paradise Lost
devl kikd outa hevn coz jelus of jesus&strts war. pd'off wiv god so corupts man(md by god) wiv apel. devl stays serpnt 4hole life&man ruind. Woe un2mnkind.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
5SistrsWntngHsbnds.NwMenInTwn-Bingly&Darcy Fit&Loadd. BigSisJaneFals4B,2ndSisLizH8sDCozHesProud.SlimySoljrWikamSysDHsShadyPast. TrnsOutHesActulyARlyNysGuy&RlyFancysLiz.SheDecydsSheLyksHim.Evry1GtsMaryd.

press - about us - dot mobile

'Lost' deal hatched for mobile

Via Lost Remote

Things that I love...

You take a hit TV show, "Lost", build in a bunch of characters that sit around the skirts of the main action, then use them to produce off-shoot stories for distribution on mobile phones. Good to keep in mind.

'Lost' deal hatched for mobile

Off-Topic - Rocketboom or Pink 5?

Hotter low-rez internet video babe (and attitude plays a part here):

Amanda Congdon from Rocketboom?

or

Amy Earhart from Pink Five, Pink Five Strikes Back and the upcoming Return of Pink Five?

People who know me will understand that this sort of objectification is usually well outside the way I think of women, but I was just sitting here watching Pink Five again, thinking how similar the two were, at least in character, not intelligence. That prompted the question, which one do I find the more attractive? Should anyone drop by and have an opinion, feel free to do so.

To be honest, it's probably because in attitude they both remind me a lot of my wife whom I get back tomorrow night for another weekend.

Mobile TV the next frontier | The Australian

Despite Australian Soccer's night-of-nights (quick off-topic: I think we all realise that Kewell's "pass" to set up Bresciano for the only regulation goal of the match was just an almost-air swing. Another half inch to the left and we're thinking about four years time, trying to keep Guus from jumping on the first plane out of Sydney), last night the Australian representatives of free-to-air commercial TV, "Free TV Australia" managed to get the chief executives of the networks - Ten's Grant Blackley, Nine's Sam Chisholm and Seven's David Leckie, together to front advertisers and supporters to talk about the future of TV in this country.

The Australian: Mobile TV the next frontier [November 17, 2005]

The Australian: Small screen's hard men show how to network [November 17, 2005]

Some interesting points brought up as to where these guys, the ones that have final say on this stufff, are willing to take Australian TV in the next five to ten years. The big mover? TV on your mobile phone;

"Mr Chisholm said Nine was involved in the trial of a new technology called DVB-H, which uses the digital TV spectrum to send normal TV channels to mobile devices. DVB-H, which is being tested in Sydney, is expected to provide a better mobile TV viewing experience than 3G mobile phones, which have limited storage capacity.

"The new battleground of this business will be mobility," Mr Chisholm said. "Radio taught us this three decades ago as they grew their business by mobility and the invention of the transistor radio." "

The problem is, these guys are still blinkered by the idea that TV is different to everything else, somehow superior, and that the only thing they need to do is repurpose existing content for the small screen using the existing broadcast schedule model. If you're going to take away some value (making the picture smaller) then you need to create some value to offset, like creating the option for video-on-demand. However in my opinion the big winner will be the one that looks beyond what they can produce as video and start making use of the technologies out there. By that I mean beyond just setting up websites as add-ons to TV programs. Of course, the question then is, if a TV company starts producing a website news service (online newspaper) or podcasting specially created programs (online radio) where do cross-media ownership laws come in? This may be one of those situations where the laws that once protected us may now, in a media world of almost unlimited reach, be holding us back.

ABC Game On | "Kafkamesto" - A Scholar Replies

Now this almost borders on hilarity.

Arrive at work, receive the latest edition of "Digital Bites", the ABC Broadband mailing list. The lovely Nicola Fern from ABC New Media publicity runs through this fortnight's changes and additions, including, to my surprise, a Flash game called "Kafkamesto" based on the works of 20th century Czech author Franz Kafka. As anyone who's read Kafka will understand, my immediate response was "huh? You did what?!?" Because what I really want to do is play a game where I've turned into a giant cockroach and my family only puts up with my disgusting presence through social duty. I want to play a game where I run around a nightmare bureaucracy to clear my name from a crime that was never even committed, let alone by me. I want to hate my father like he despises me!

"That's it!" I thought, "Let's get the kiddies understanding the hopelessness and absurdity of life as a 20th century man, struggling through personal neuroses and social anonymity!"

It turns out to be a pretty basic adventure game (turn left, turn right, click on the items, talk to the bad guys, everybody hates me...) so in that respect it was kind of fun.

The amusing part, to which this post makes specific reference, is an academic response from "Emeritus Professor Janusz Kazmierczak, Reader in Comparative European Literature, Columbia University, New York." It seems that the authors of the game contacted the good professor to assist with the intellectual elements underlying their proposal and add his name as a "technical adviser." His reply is printed on its own page.

My immediate response to his comments began with surprise and amusement;

"Let me make it utterly clear from the outset that I have no time for games. I abhor crosswords, detest puzzles and absolutely loathe rebuses and the like. Even as a small child, I purposely shunned all forms of schoolyard hi-jinks, instead preferring my own company and the adventures of Huck Finn or David Copperfield to indulge in. And now, as a cultural scholar somewhat reluctantly approaching his ‘twilight years’, I maintain nothing more than passing academic interest in the decadent cultural declinations of the so-called ‘PlayStation generation’ and their persistent idle pursuit of instantaneous reward..."

prodded cautiously through the jungles of disbelief;

"I still remain tormented by this experience albeit only through my loose association with the correspondents as detailed above. As one of Kafka’s own characters remarks in his novel Der Process, “The main thing is to ask questions…” And indeed the questions abound. Why did these potentially talented lads waste their time (and government money, no doubt) employing designers, binary coders and the like to manufacture such a trivial and pointless pursuit? Who would ever take the time to ‘load’ this game, let alone attempt to engage with it on an intellectual level, when there are so many unread stories and letters that any true scholar of Kafka still has yet to savour? I shall never know the answer to such questions, nor will I stay up late at night pondering them."

and kind of finished up somewhere sitting on the fence between the fields of whimsy and derision;

"Long before the silicon surge of seventies’ games such as Space Invaders or Super Ethnic Brothers sparked the jaded imagination of a generation of idle youth - the “X-ers” as I am reliably told - the world’s first interactive medium was still abundantly available, yet vigorously ignored. I am, of course referring to the book. Instantly accessible, readily obtainable; its ‘program’ relying solely on harnessing the inexhaustible memory and imagination of the user, rather than driven by the finite power of any external operating system.

So in conclusion, to those of you with serious academic intent and purpose, I recommend you ‘log on’ to the ‘wide wide world’ beyond your ‘desktop’ and ‘download’ a truly interactive experience by simply visiting your local library and reading a goddamn book."

A very funny read on a number of levels, and I'm still not convinced that the good professor doesn't have his tongue placed squarely in his cheek.

ABC Game On - "Kafkamesto" - Behind the Screens - A Scholar Replies

MICHAEL ROSENBERG: A year later, Palace brawl still too fresh | Detroit Free Press

Some people celebrate wedding anniversaries, others hold as solemn great moments of national pride. One of the things this weblog is supposed to talk about is hoops, and so I post remembrance to the defining moment of last year's NBA season, "the Brawl" (or "The night Artest snapped once too often").

Journalist Michael Rosenberg reminisces on his part in the events:

"You know the guy Artest went after? I was the guy next to that guy. On the video replay, you can clearly see me, the stunningly handsome guy who looks like he's soiling himself.

...I instinctively took a couple of steps back; in the confusion, I guess I thought I was at an NHL fight and didn't want to be the third man in. Then I took a step forward and the following thought popped into my head:

I should step between them and break it up.

...I didn't try, because one rule of journalism is that you aren't supposed to become the story, and one rule of life is that you shouldn't volunteer to get the snot beaten out of you."

Lest we forget... whatever.

MICHAEL ROSENBERG: A year later, Palace brawl still too fresh | Detroit Free Press

The Challenge has been laid down... | plasticbag.org

Tom Coates (formerly of the BBC, now starting his new job at Yahoo) through his site PlasticBag.org talks about Google's new Beta launch Google Base, a central site for people to upload their content to make it more easily accessible and searchable.

"From a personal perspective, I don't quite get it - there's no obvious reason I can think of for an individual to post a recipe to the service - but from a business perspective it's really interesting. Basically it's a complete circumvention of the problems with the Semantic web which abandons decentralisation and microformats completely. If your company has a database of things (whether that be products or pictures or weblog posts or news articles or whatever) that it represents on the web, then Google Base suggests that you should not wait to be spidered and nor should you expect them to do all the heavy-lifting to work out what your site is about. Instead, you just bulk upload all your data to Google directly and associate each entry with your corresponding page on the web..."

"It's not all positive for the businesses or start-ups, of course. It consolidates the idea of Google or a parallel search engine as the definitive place to find out information of any kind (rather than the local brand that you usually associate with events, restaurants or whatever). And that kind of corresponds to a larger question about whether Google is gradually and systematically eating the web."

The fun part comes at the end when he lays down a challenge to his old employers at the British Broadcasting Corporation.

"My old colleague Mr Biddulph (who has been freelancing for the BBC for a few months) and Mr Hammersley (of RSS, web services and utilikilt infamy) have been working on a representation of the BBC Archives Infax database for a few months. They've written about it in two pieces: The BBC's programme catalogue (on Rails) and Hot BBC Archive Action. So why not make this content more explorable and searchable (and help define the way the web understands TV and radio programming) by bulk-submitting the entire massive database to Google Base? That would be an extraordinarily interesting move..."

An interesting move indeed. Let's see if there's a response...

In which Google Base launches... (plasticbag.org)

While we're at it, he had an interesting article yesterday on whether "subscription media" via technology like podcasting will kill streaming video, or even, as he posits, broadcast.

Will subscription media kill broadcast? (plasticbag.org)