Our second child – Olivia Grace Locke – was born last night at 11.18pm in Brighton. When Rose was born I did a quick bit of Google futurology to see what lay in store. Well, I know now – its lots of photo opportunities, and very little time to maintain a blog! Expect this site to go from its one-post-every-two-months average to something like 2-3 posts a year… I think my Flickr account is going to see some action, though…

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Ashley Highfield, Director of New Media & Technology at the BBC, shared a platform with Bill Gates for the Keynote speech at Microsoft’s Mix06 conference. He showed a prototype of ‘MyBBCPlayer’ – an on-demand TV platform – built within Microsoft’s new Vista operating system. Its well worth checking out the webcast of the speech (Ashley comes on about 36mins in) it shows the player as a widget on the desktop – demonstrating the kind of ‘beyond the browser’ interface that we’re building on the Innovation Labs. There’s also a news article in the Guardian on how the BBC plans to work with external partners to overhaul its website for the Web2.0 era. Well worth reading to see how BBC New Media is committed to external innovation, and to give a strategic context to projects like Backstage and Innovation Labs.

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I’m currently in a hotel in North Yorkshire with 10 new media companies, helping them develop ideas for new web services, and build a pitch to BBC commissioners by Friday. We’ve got mentors from the BBC and experts in user-centred design who have worked at places like Xeroc Park, Sapient and Ideo. We’re at the end of the second day now, and most of the teams have already gone through about 4 or 5 iterations of their idea, looking at it from the perspective of the technology, the user, or the BBC, and getting feedback from everyone on their idea and pitching style. Its pretty intense, but good fun, and really creative – my brain hasn’t had a workout like this for some time.

This is all part of a project I’ve been developing over the last year called Innovation Labs. Its a pilot initiative to try and see how the BBC can work with new media indies across the UK. We had a call for ideas in late autumn last year, and recieved over 170 ideas from the three pilot projects in Yorkshire, London and the North-West. 29 ideas were selected, and we’ve been giving feedback to the teams over the last few months, preparing them for the rapid-prototyping exercises they’ll be doing in the week-long Lab.

Its a bit like a foo-camp, but with commissioning opportunities at the end. Even though the companies here are effectively in competition, there’s a huge amount of collaboration and sharing going on, as people give advice and suggestions across teams. Tomorrow, two commissioners from the BBC internet team – Jem Stone and Jason Daponte – turn up to give advice prior to the pitching, so things might get a bit more ruthless then…

We’ve redesigned the Innovation Labs site to reflect the week long events, with live blogs by mentors and participants at the Labs (although everyone seems too busy working at the moment to blog, so I might have to offer other incentives…)

Its an interesting and exciting project, but will only be worthwhile if it ends up in more good ideas being developed and commissioned by the BBC from outside companies. We’ll know by the end of March – after the third and final Lab in London – whether this has happened, but the signs are good, and I’ve already been talking to other regions across the UK about hosting Labs, so hopefully we can do it again, but make it bigger and better. Personally, I’m loving spending so much time discussing ideas with creative people, and would love to do it again next year.

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I’ve got a new camera – a Bronica ETRSi. Its another analogue, medium-format camera, but single lens, instead of my Mamiya twin lens. The set-up I’ve got (second-hand) includes the ETRSi body, a 70mm lens, AE Prism Finder, Speed Grip and 120 and Polaroid backs. The speed grip and AE finder means that it operates like a large, slightly more cumbersome 35mm SLR, so hopefully I’ll be able to shoot more with this than the Mamiya, which needs a separate light meter. At the moment, i’m just playing around and getting used to handling it, and having a lot of fun with the Polariod back. I’ll put up some pictures soon, but in the meantime, here’s one I took today of fellow brighton resident (and ace blogger) Anthony Mayfield)

Anthony Mayfield

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Hannah Redler

David Weinberger

Rob Le Frenais

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Honor Harger

Andrew Chetty

Tom Cullen

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I took my medium format camera to Ars Electronica last year, to keep up my sporadic series of photos of people from the art/tech community. Here’s eight that I thought good enough to show. They were all taken in the Brucknerhaus, the main venue for the Ars Electronica conference, which has a fantastic panoramic window facing onto the Danube. On one of my last evenings at the festival, there was a fantastic golden sunlight coming through the windows, so I grabbed a few friends and acquaintances and persuaded them to stand for a minute or so whilst I fumbled with light meters and such. Thanks to those who had the patience…

Nina Czegledy
NB: Nina is one of the most delightful and interesting people i’ve ever met – a real inspiration

Ben Cerveny

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Of course, I’m a bit late to this and many other bloggers have already circulated it wildly, but I’m really, really pleased to see the second of the BBC’s Creative Archive projects go live – The Open News Archive.

There’s some fantastic footage there, making this far more interesting to browse through than the footage released for the Radio 1 Superstar VJ competition. It’ll be interesting to see how it gets used in creative projects, though.

When we were first kicking around ideas for how people might want to use the Creative Archive a few years ago, one of the key decisions was whether to make content available under a single project site, or to tie individual projects to existing brands. I think the latter has been the right choice, as creativity works best within a context. A context-less archive would be bigger and more flexible, but only advanced users would really benefit from that flexibility. Having a specific context and even a brief – as with the Radio 1 competition – provides more than simply a blank page for people to start with. Hopefully, this will encourage more people to engage with the content.

Of course, ideally we’d have both – a inspiration from familiar contexts for people to start with, and then open buckets of good stuff for more advanced users to play around. The Backstage discussion list have already been talking about how to build tools to aggregate the content from different CA projects, so hopefully one user innovation project will be able to help out another!

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This is hardly the most frequently-updated blog on the block, but leaving it nearly three months between posts is stretching it, even for me. In mitigation, i’m getting more work done at the moment than I have for years…

And the thing i’m working on most of the time is fantastic. Please go and check out the site for BBC Innovation Labs. This is a kind of sister project to Backstage, aimed more at independent UK new media companies, rather than individual developers, although I expect the backstage and labs communities will have significant overlaps.

Labs is a pilot project to help build better opportunities for indies and the BBC to work together on innovation projects. Tom Loosemore and I have been working on lots of ‘open innovation’ projects aimed at various communities – developers (backstage), and indies (labs) were first, with other projects in development.

The Labs process works like this – we invite proposals to a research brief from indies, and select around 10 projects. The teams behind these projects are then invited to a week-long residential rapid-protoyping workshop, before pitching their ideas at the end of the Lab to the controllers for internet and iTV at the BBC.

Its a simple process, but effective. It helps the BBC hold a conversation about its strategies and priorities with hundreds of indies in an open and discursive way, and encourages rapid development and decision making so that ideas can be turned into things that actually happen. Hopefully, i’ll be able to talk about 30-odd fantastic prototypes that have come out of the Labs around the end of March next year…

We’re holding launch events at the moment in the three pilot regions – the second London launch is this Friday, and the final event in Manchester next Monday. If the pilots are successful for everyone invovled, we’ll try and roll out the project to more regions across the UK next year.

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Photos from Blickling Hall, Norfolk

Tree Trunk at Blickling Hall

Blickling Hall

Hedges at Blickling Hall

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