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a-cubed

Listed below are comments made by a-cubed between Friday, 25th July 2008 and Tuesday, 9th June 2009.

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The PM Glass Box. 5:42pm on 09 Jun 2009 The Mobile Phone Directory service can be found on 118800.co.uk (took quite a while to track that down). As others have commented in various pieces about this new service recently, there appears to be no way to opt out that doesn't cost the opter money. terrible. They appear to be based in Reading. If I can find out where, I might try and walk in to their office and hand-deliver an opt-out instructoin :-).
Listening to the BNP. 5:22pm on 09 Jun 2009 The UAF should not get to decide who can speak and what is acceptable. Freedom of speech is a fundamental necessity for a free society. Yes, there are limits, but these need to be the absolute minimum limits, backed up by full due process in an open court. Yes, this great freedom of speech is open to abuse by people skirting the illegal line, but you answer them with proper journalism, questioning and use of your own freedom of speech. The BNP have views I find appalling, but I also find the UAF views appalling. All they do when you raise the freedom of speech question is parrot "the BNP are fascists and should be denied a platform". They should get out there and campaign positively for toleration and rational debate, and encourage people to vote critically rather than using violent action (I'm sure the BC cameraman who got an egg in the face regards this as violence) to deny others their basic human rights. Two wrongs don't make a right and the UAF have shown themselves today to be just as wrong as the BNP.
myCBBC: All Your Stuff In One Place? 07:42am on 25 Jul 2008 How much, if any, customisation of the services offered is a key question for many businesses and services in the modern world. The book "Mashup Corporations" by Mulholland, Thomas, Kurchina and Woods deals with these same sorts of questions that CBBC is considering. In the case of CBBC obviously there are some extra interesting questions to do with the use of their site by very young children. Social networking has always been a significant part of the usage of the internet. The earliest mass applications were email lists and usenet discussion groups and many of these were social rather than work oriented (the sf-lovers mailing list for example). The advent of the web and the personal home page allowed people to become their own broadcasters just as much as the modern SNS sites, although the barriers to entry in terms of technological literacy were higher. Questions of "ownership" of "brand" have always been there in the digital world but are becoming more difficult as the mass usage of such things becomes the norm not the individual exception.
The question for the BBC should, IMO, focus on the issue of its public service remit. Dos the provision of a free "walled garden" SNS for youngsters come within its remit? If so, should that remit restrict itself to contents for which the BBC is directly responsible for producing, or include those it broadcasts, or include those which children find of interest outside the BBCs' content. In addition, should the principle question be answered that it should include material from outside the BBCs production/broadcast remit, then it becomes a practical matter as to whether it has the resource to spend on allowing it. The analysis needs to consider as well whether the lack of external material will make the system offered by the BC a failure in making it so unattractive to children that they do not use it (at which point it's pointless providing it at all). Since the concept of the walled garden restricts any concept of interoperability (and anyway SNS are generally not offering or considering interoperability) the BBC needs to consider if its offering will be of sufficient interest to make it worthwhile.
I think the approach of an initial offering including only BBC-specific material is a worthwhile public service offering. If the lack of external material becomes a bar to its utility for the intended audience then it is probable that offering to appropriately license the BBC's material to suitable external sites may be better than paying money for external licenses.

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