Back from SF
September 2nd, 2003 § 2 Comments
Currently jet-lagged, and catching up after a lovely trip to San Francisco, spent eating in fine restaurants, digging for old vinyl and getting more used to taking pictures with my medium format camera. Whilst I was away, I didn’t go online once, and hardly read a newspaper, so I’ve got that weird dislocated experience of picking through nearly two weeks of news in small, non-linear fragments.
Two major stories broke that directly affect what I do – the (long-awaited) announcement of who would lead the Government review of the BBC’s Internet Services, and Greg Dyke trailing the Creative Archive in his Edinburgh speech. The two are symbiotically related, in that the Creative Archive is one illustration of what the BBC’s role on the internet should be in the future. I’d like to think I had a part to play in the Creative Archive – I organised an event with Larry Lessig in February, then took some BBC people over to see Larry and Brewster Kahle in SF whilst I was at ETCON, and have contributed to the project since. But the truth is, the idea of doing something with the archive online had been kicking around the organisation for ages – the team I run at the BBC have been developing concept ideas in this area for the last 3 years, and there have been many, many others trying to find ways to do something with the vast cultural heritage of the organisation. Danny has written an excellent article for the Guardian Online about the annoucement, and followed it up with a couple of good blog posts. The comments on Danny’s posts are really interesting, in particular about the scale of the project, and what it could feasibly achieve in its first iterations.
I’m really pleased the project was mentioned in Greg’s speech, although the debate doesn’t seem to have kicked off in the press over here. Regardless of that, it makes the BBC a *very* exciting place to work at the moment, and actually makes me want to get back to work. I think that’s the first time I’ve ever come back from a holiday and felt like that…
