Excellent news!

Many thanks to the various organisers of the brilliantly run campaign to oppose the Corporation’s management proposals to close the station.

I attended the second demonstration protesting against the proposed closure of BBC 6 Music in the West End on Saturday 22 May 2010.

The day started at midday at the well attended demonstration, outside Broadcasting House, with a range of speakers and performers, expertly compared by Jon Holmes.

Later at 229 Great Portland Street there was a fantastic music gig connected with the demo. Artists included Eliza Carthy, Mirror Kicks, Magic Numbers (pictured) and Doyle & the Four Fathers.

The public consultation, carried out by the BBC Trust, has now closed.

The Trust plans to publish provisional conclusions this summer, and a final strategy in the autumn.

I haven’t seen anyone saying that 6 Music should close, and if the Trust propose to close the station, I’d be very interested to see their arguments.

On 29 April 2010 I attended the launch party for Orange Coconut, a new television post production company, founded by Nick Carroll and Gary Hewson.

For the evening The Bull was frequented by an assorted group of BBC-types and other broadcasting luminaries to celebrate Orange Coconut opening for business.

To support the company I’ve built a new site on a WordPress platform.

The basis of the site is to let the pictures do the talking – hence the liberal use of YouTube embedding!

I attended the fantastic demonstration protesting at the proposed closure of BBC 6 Music at Broadcasting House on Saturday organised by the Save 6 Music Facebook group.

Demonstrators from all parts of the country were joined by many of the radio station’s presenters, including Lauren Laverne, Tom Robinson, Liz Kershaw, Gideon Coe, Andrew Collins and Adam Buxton.

During one of the speeches, Tom Robinson made a point that hadn’t occurred to me about the proposals. He said the radio plans covering 6 Music and the Asian Network are part of a larger project that is fundamentally about marketing.

He said the management view was that the current branding is too confusing for listeners with too many station names. Therefore the plan is to have Radios 1 to 5, with related stations named 1Xtra, 2Xtra, etc.

No surprise given the marketing background of Tim Davie, BBC Director of Audio and Music.

Along with the speeches, there was also musical entertainment from The Coal Porters, Mirrorkicks, Black Soul Strangers, The Brute Chorus and Allo Darlin’.

Support was also given to the campaigns to oppose the closure of the Asian Network and cuts to the BBC website during the event.

At the conclusion of the gathering Adam Buxton summed up its purpose with the chant:

What do we want?
Leave us alone!
When do we want it?
For a long time!

Whilst watching Channel 4′s The Greatest Ever 3D Moments I found it incredibly annoying having to constantly put on and take off my anaglyph glasses.

Of course, there was some archive material that was shot in 2D, but why weren’t the interviews that appeared throughout the programme recorded in 3D?

This spoiled an otherwise mildly entertaining programme.

Jenson Button’s immaculate Formula 1 victory from pole this weekend against the glamorous backdrop of Monte Carlo prompts me to look at the BBC coverage.

Monte Carlo is the sixth Formula 1 race covered by the BBC since it gained the TV rights from ITV at the end of the last season.

The Corporation already had the UK radio rights, which, along with the inherited live streaming rights and the red button channels showing practice sessions and alternative race coverage, a true multi-platform service has been provided.

The BBC Formula 1 site has provided the hub for all of the coverage, which, now we’re just over a third of the way through the season, has proved to be of a very high standard.

The coverage was always going to improve on ITV, just by the absence of ad breaks, but with BBC Sport obviously expending a lot more time and effort on scene set items and background material, it has produced one of the most polished sports productions in recent years.

Spent the weekend of 28-29 March 2009 at the excellent BarCamp London 6 at The Guardian offices in the swish new Kings Place building in London N1.

Here’s some of the sessions I participated in:

• ABC of the new guardian.co.uk – Nik Silver led a session, based on his Inside guardian.co.uk blog posts, looking the Guardian R2 web CMS and its development since the start of the project in 2006 using domain driven design and agile techniques. It was interesting to note the project is ahead of schedule and under budget.
• The guardian.co.uk API – Simon Willison demonstrated the features of the recently released guardian.co.uk Content API and Data Store.
• Making kick arse video navigation – Chris Jackson gave a presentation on the recently launched URIplay, an open media metadata aggregator. It’ll be interesting to see how this develops.
• The challenge of archiving the BBC’s content – Jonathan Tweed outlined preliminary work on bringing the Corporation’s vast archive online, building on the current /programmes and /music architecture.
• What I learnt organising a conference – Dominic Hodgson led a session on his experience of organising Think Visibility.
• The web of data and personal information – A thought provoking session on the semantic web by Mischa Tuffield.

Two days of varied and fascinating sessions, millions of Lego pieces, a great bunch of attendees and crashing overnight after beer and pizza resulted in a great weekend.

• Malcolm Gladwell – The man who can’t stop thinking [Observer] Interview with the author of The Tipping Point and Blink on the eve of the publication of his new book Outliers. Some extracts from the book, along with Geek gurus: The rise of social psychology.
• 10 things you need to know about WordPress 2.7 [Technosailor] Summary of the shortly to be released new version of WordPress.
• Commercial radio needs to fix its own problems, not moan about Radio 1 [Guardian] “Commercial radio companies argue that Radio 1 is dodging its remit by targeting over-30s – when what they are really bothered about is the success of Chris Moyles. And what they should actually be doing is finding a Moyles of their own”.

• Why the open strategy is a good idea [Matt McAlister] Matt thinks “we’re on the cusp of an explosion of open strategies and concepts across all markets, not least of which is the publishing world”.
• 1,000 web APIs [ProgrammableWeb] “Last week ProgrammableWeb crossed one of its biggest milestones thus far when we added the 1,000th web service API to our API directory.”
• Prototyping with XHTML [Boxes and Arrows] “Leverage code as a design and specification platform.”
• The week that Britain’s culture wars broke out [Observer] “The BBC’s attempts to create cross-generational entertainment have opened up new fault lines.”
• SERTUC conference on PSB [BECTU] “The South Eastern Regional TUC‘s Creative and Leisure section, is organising a conference on the future of public service broadcasting … on Saturday 15 November 2008.” Update 10 November 2008 at 1607: The conference has been postponed.

• Google Chrome why? [Tom Scott] Why have Google built their own browser and how does it relate to Firefox?
• Mozilla Ubiquity [Dan Brickley] A look at the Mozilla Labs experimental Firefox extension.
• Radio Pop – social radio listening [BBC Radio Labs] Background to their Radio Pop experimental prototype site.
• 10 principles of the PHP masters [NETTUTS] “The best principles to follow for high-grade PHP programming” according to the site.