Slashdot Mirror
BBC to Provide Extensive RSS
Georgie2032 writes "The BBC News Online's Editor states that beginning in the middle of May, the BBC will be 'completely liberating the availability of its content' using its Really Simple Syndication (RSS) tool. 'So in May we'll be happy for outside websites to dip in and take our headlines'"
If they do this for press releases, Slashdot won't even need editors anymore!
Oops, never mind. What's new is that BBC will now allow external websites to feed on them. But why would they want to do that? Considering AFP's suit against Google and all, it seems rather strange they would allow other websites to have BBC's news on their pages.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition /front_page/rss091.xml
But why would they want to do that? Considering AFP's suit against Google and all, it seems rather strange they would allow other websites to have BBC's news on their pages.
..Its a trap.
sure they say its ok now, but just when you feel safe publishing their stories that claim will have mysteriously dissapeared from their site..
thats when the lawsuits start.
Starsucks
I don't really understand what RSS has to do with this. Why would adding an additional protocol, suddenly make them more amenable to others "dipping" into their headlines? After all, the HTML technology of the web allows others to use their headlines. So, does this statement mean they weren't happy about others using their headlines before?
What is this magical property of RSS that makes the BBC happier about having their headlines used elsewhere?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Why would they wait until AFTER the U.K. elections? It seems like it would be more advantageous to open it up now, before the elections.
The BBC is a public information service and doesnt rely on advert to get money but every english perosn paying for the privilage of having a TV or radio, this may be an alien concept to many americans but this is why the BBC can give other sites access to their RSS feed, because they dont cling to users visiting their site to keep their heads above water and resorting to obnoxious flash adverts and popups
...welcome our new... no... who cares. Too bloody apathetic at this hour... No, can't even manage a Python reference either.
:q
Still faster to listen to fellow techs from Britain online and a lot more colourful too. This can go in the "Yes, but can they make it into efficient text for my cell browser?" Department.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
I'll stick with my "Fair and Balanced" Fox News broadcasts/websites. Afterall, those evil Europeans are nothing but future terrorists and Christ killers!
Who do they think they are syndicating content without permission from US Copyright courts? [sic]
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
I think somebody just found their towel...
There is a long and ongoing conflict between the BBC and the other online media in the UK. BBC has been able to nearly exterminate all UK online news except the specialized ones. Even those have nowdays moved to a subscription model (FT, DT and the like). It is free, it is high quality and it is updated round the clock. This is seriously annoying most newspaper owners and editors who see their circulation dropping and online presence being pushed into the oblivion. Allowing them to feed on an RSS feed is a great marketing ploy. They instead of protesting endlessly will now become largely dependant on BBC news online existing. Once this happens Blair (or any other creature which replaces him) will no longer have the option to exterminate news.bbc.co.uk for "efficiency of public spending" reasons.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
The current feeds are made accessible for personal use only. The difference is that the Beeb will now be OK with commercial sites using them without prior agreement/contract.
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's
However, all is not well with the news content. The BBC is famous for switching to "propaganda mode" whenever British interests are involved, as good as they are with things that are far away. Also, there are been repeated charges of a systematic anti-Israeli bias in their coverage.
They do great work, but for all the gushing, do remember they have their share of problems.
installed by Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, and is now all fired up about RSS.
The screensaver shows a swirling mist of RSS headlines from a selected feed, and every few seconds zooms in on one, lets you read it, then twists it away into vapor.
Hard to describe, but there's a movie here which shows it in action.
Pure eye candy of course, but majorly cool!
"Extensive Really Simple Syndication?" So it's both extensive (Large in extent, range, or amount) and simple (composed of only one element). Hmm.
Kinda like the MPEG-4 "Advanced Simple Profile," maybe.
The BBC is an out of date tax on broadcast media that it morally wrong and uncompetitive. The BBC itself is an organization riddled with beaurocracy, massive egos, huge salaries, unhealthy festering cliques and class A drug habits paid for off the back of the British people.
Yes, it's all those things, and yet it does a better job than all your free market organizations riddled with their bureaucracy, massive egos, huge salaries, unhealthy festering cliques and class A drug habits paid for off the back of their subscribers.
You simply don't like the fact that our TV crap is better quality than your TV crap, doesn't irritate the hell out of people with adverts, and is free to RSS to the world. Grow up, and enjoy the competition resulting from a different market model. Oh and by the way, our tax is a hell of a lot less than you guys pay for TV.
Ummm.
Maybe I'm missing something, but the 'honestreporting.com' site does seem to have a single aim of increasing the amount of PR favouring Jewish interests.
If you are after balance, it strikes me as odd that you would refer
I am not a particular fan of the BBC, and its 'youth' shows are shockingly bad, especially radio 1, which is for tards. But its news is pretty good, in an up-itself British sort of way.
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
Great job !! we appreciate it.
Riiz
Yes, but one can say the same about American media being too pro-Israeli. Notice when you watch American TV, there is little coverage of actions taken by the Israeli army in the occupied territories.
Example from your link:
"This is a highly sensitive issue," the narrator says, but "the majority of neo-conservatives have been and remain Jewish...are strongly pro-Zionist and want to topple regimes in the Middle East to help Israel..." Says bbcwatch, "It is hard to find clear blue water between these theories and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion."
Umm, why else did the Iraq war take place?
Suicide Killers: Everyman (4/3/02) : The psychology and ideology of the suicide bomber worldwide. "One is made to feel sorry for and sympathetic with the Palestinian suicide bomber who says he 'loved life and wanted to be a doctor. Occupation has murdered my dreams.'"
I don't care for suicide bombers, but when your family is killed and their house is bulldozed by Israeli tanks, you do feel bad for them.
Looks at the build-up of Israel's nuclear weapons program. The documentary begins by asking the ominous questions "Which country in the Middle East has undeclared nuclear weapons?" "Which country in the Middle East has undeclared biological and chemical capabilities?" and "Which country in the Middle East has no outside inspections?"
This is true though. Israel has a nucleur weapons program in a very heated region, yet other countries around dare to build one because of US pressure. How is this fair?
The hidden world of Palestinian terrorists (referred to throughout as 'militias' and 'martyrs'). "Terrorist bombings of Israeli civilians are painted as an entirely legitimate activity, almost heroic."
And the Israeli army do not do the same to Palestinans (killing young children armed with stones)?
Those arguments presented in the article of the link you posted are very naive....
I think thats probably due to the israeli's killing their reporters and carmera men. Its kind of a hard thing to get over experically when its all caught on film. Maybe another reason for it is there is a general anti-Israeli sentiment in british society. Note this is not the same an anti-semitism but related to the israeli-Palestinian conflict, which many find abhorrent.
:)
Considering the amount of disagreements the BBC has had with the goverment of the day durin its time maybe it should be called an Anti-Propaganda Mode.
The BBC while not perfect is generally held to alot higher standard then other broadcasters, and I think that is something to be proud of.
Shoot me
It is interesting to note that the website that is given to highlight the anti-israeli bias (http://www.honestreporting.com/) in the BBCs coverage is affiliated to http://www.israelpetition.com/, which has the following quote at the top of their webpage
"For Zion's sake I will not be silent,
and for Jerusalem's sake I will not rest."
Isaiah 62:1
While individual programmes broadcasted by the BBC may contain some bias, I think it is fair to assume that honestreporting.com has an even larger bias, given its affiliations!
Hrm. According to the article, BBC's current RSS feeds are for personal use. However, slashdot has been republishing the BBC Tech News in a slashbox for quite some time.
Further investigation shows this page which indicates that UK Based sites can also make free use of the syndicated feeds. It seems other sites need to license them.
"When I grow up, I want to be a weirdo"
Actually I'd disagree that the BBC News is biased. The problem is that all the other news services in this country are obsessively shallow and/or right-wing biased. Just watching Sky News for a bit brings home to you how disgusting they are. I remember the rail crash near Paddington in '99. The hotel only had Sky on and they kept showing footage of the crash interspersed with comments about how this footage was exclusive and brought to them by a loyal Sky News watcher.
Essentially the BBC's job is to question the government and the opposition. They are a about as un-biased as you will get but the rest of the media makes them seem biased because they follow the route of hounding after 'celebrities' and the money big business provides. Or else they pander (like the Daily Mail) to small-minded thoughts that cease to have any bearing 3 miles outside someone's home: The "lock up the criminal scum (poor/black/non-christian people) but don't you dare build any prisons near MY house" mentality.
Personally, I'd point to the recent election broadcasts as evidence that the BBC aren't especially biased. If they have any point of view, it is a cynical point of view regarding *all* politicians. Which, in a democracy, is only healthy.
Relative to the US media, they are left wing. But the US broadcast media is very right wing, in any case.
I've heard that one and I'm honestly at a push to see how they can get away with it.
If it becomes a tax on computers - fine. I'll get a ZX spectrum.
If it becomes a tax on Internet-capable computers - fine, I'll plug an ISA ethernet card into a 386, put Linux on it and put it on the Internet. "Try watching streaming video on that, your honour."
Seems to me that we have technology giving us infinitely more flexibility in how we do things and media companies who aren't prepared for this and so are trying to get their income through taxing the technology to death. True whether it's the RIAA, MPAA, BBC, RAC, VGA or XLA.
Meanwhile, there are also persistent claims of systematic pro-Israeli bias.
l
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article2402.shtm
Seems to me, they've got the balance pretty right.
I dunno. I might support some form of internet licensing.
We can use this to weed out spammers (if email access has to be tied to a specific license, and mail servers can be set to reject all 'anonymous' receipts), reduce advertising, and maybe enforce some sort of compulsary training scheme for internet newbies. (e.g. don't run email vbs scripts, you stupid, stupid boy....)
Obviously, there are technical questions that need to be answered, but maybe a little regulation isn't a bad thing, in the right hands.
The BBC is a well-respected source of unbiased news. (Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell disagree with that, but events have proved how wrong they are.)
To have other sites using their news feed will enhance the reputation of the Corporation further and can only be a good thing as far as they are concerned. Because they strongly depend upon their reputation when it comes to gettting funding it's a win-win situation.
That's a very good reason for the decision.
Something is happening here but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr Jones.
You can also watch Fox News on Sky somewhere (channel 524-ish). If that's "Fair and Balanced" then I'm a banana.
Sky News may be from the gutter but at least they don't get done for lying, unlike Fox News.
...and specifically allowed big news sites (like slashdot) to use their RSS to generate news boxes like those found here. They didn't allow every man and his blog to use it (waste of resources) but looks now like they're going to.
I am NaN
Nearly exterminate? There are still more than a few news organisations with online presences:
Reuters
The Times
The Guardian (interesting... the content is free but if you want to read it in a paper format you can subscribe)
The Sun
The Mirror
ITN Sites, e.g. Channel 4 News
The Scotsman (a surprisingly large online presence)
The sites you mention: FT and Telegraph, it isn't surprising they charge as they have concentrated readerships with higher levels of disposable income, so why not go for a straightforward revenue model?
I have no doubt that the popularity of BBC news is for reasons consistent with the popularity of their television and radio news: high quality and impartial in a way commercially sponsored news could not be (commercial news also remains very popular: the total cross-media circulation of ITN, Times, Sun, etc is massive).
What about Channel 4 News? They go into much deeper into issues of the day than any other newcast, and press guests when they don't answer the question asked (i.e. doing a Blair).
As for papers, have you ever read the Independent? The story on the front page is actually a story. They don't publish stories about David Beckham's latest haircut, and the don't publish idle celebrity gossip (in fact, no mention was made of the Blunkett affair until it transpired that he may have used his powers inappropriately). Admittedly, sometimes they can be a bit heavy with the anti-Bush sentiment, but I think they are the most impartial of the dailies.
Allergy advice: Contains eggs.
The typical BBC pattern is get everyone hooked on the Sopranos, Twin Peaks, [insert your favorite series here], then once everyone is *really* into it, replace the time slot with Snooker. Happines every single time. Of course they promise to bring the series back 'in the future'... but anyone with a life can't keep up with their whims. And for what? Snooker?! How come Sopranos .torrents are busy(?); ever seen a snooker .torrent?
It must be a winning formula though. They are consistent. I love RSS, but can't get into the beeb. Fuck snooker. Can RSS save 'em? RSS is pretty powerful, but I doubt it's enough.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
There's no anti-Israeli bias in the British media, or indeed the British population in general.
The reason that these allegations are made is because the Israeli government is used to the overwhelming pro-Israeli bias in the US media. When foreign (not just British) media displays any kind of balance (by, say, criticising a decision made by the Israeli government) then cries of 'Anti-Semite' go up.
Yeah. In my opinion, the news media in the UK covers a fair spectrum. TV news breaks down into: (Warning, ruthless stereotyping ahead)
Left: Channel 4
Centre: BBC
Right: Sky News, ITV news(?)
The broadsheet newspapers:
Right: Daily Telegraph
Centre-right: Times, Financial Times
Centre-left: Guardian
Left: Independent
The tabloid newspapers:
Erratic whackjobs: Sun
Far right: Daily Mail
Left: Daily Mirror
Don't care so long as we get big breasts: Daily Star
Correct w/ regard to the definition of a semite, but wrong for the definition of an anti-semite.
Anti-Semitism was term coined to specificaly refer to hatred against Jews, not semites in general. Read that for more info than I can be bothered to type.
No wonder "meme" is an English word
no its greek actually
[Shortening (modeled on gene), of mimeme from Greek mimma, something imitated, from mimeisthai, to imitate. See mimesis.]
even the American dictionary gets that right, i guess your schooling didnt though, not suprising though.
Try Newsnight or Question Time, both essentially news programmes. Not incedentally, it's Newsnight's Paxman who is famous for interrogating guests, particularily repeating a question to Michael Howard 14 times because he wasnt satisfied that he got a proper answer (I think there's a video but I dont have Realplayer). Being interviewed by Paxman is seen like some kind of hazing ritual by policicians. Question Time has the public giving the policicians a hammering - especially the recent election special one.
FWIW I watch both BBC and Ch4 news, and would agree with you that Ch4 is more analytical, but taken in the context of news coverage rather than just newscasts and I think BBC actually takes it, though both are commendable.
I read a while ago an article (IIRC from The Guardian, whom almost certainly finds BBC as it's biggest competetor online) complaining how BBC websites are paid by the domestic licence fee and yet a massive chunk of it's cost is from foreign readers.
You cant just buy that kind of advertising of British culture, or influence of British values. Nobody ever complained about people in Africa learning English (proper English, I might add) from BBC Worldwide. Online: Americans, Chinese, Iraqis, perhaps a few North Koreans read from a perspective alien to their domestic news corporations. Anyway how many of these foreign connections are British overseas? Pretty much every Briton I know who travels reads BBC website every time they get 'net access in order to catch up with whats going on at home.
The BBC is a well-respected source of unbiased news.
No, it's horribly biased by British culture. I remember during the DC sniper case, their American correspondent couldn't get it through her head that Americans weren't going to rise up and demand a national gun ban. She went into a gun-store like it was a weapons depot in some third-world country.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
Maybe this is for ppl who use M$ IE? LOL.
MGE Viper Case/DFI LanParty UT NF4/3 x WD Raptor 64GB
AMD Athlon 64 FX-55/ATI Radeon X800 Pro/1GB XMS 3200
I don't think that is bias. You seem to be suggesting that if it weren't for the BBC the british would love guns just as much as the americans.
In actual fact here reporting was reflecting the fact that your average man on the street in Britain is opposed to gun public ownership.
thats really cool, wonder if there is one availiable for windows or linux ?
now is the time to make it easier to use with Firefox. Instead of that lame error about xml stylesheets, do the obvious thing and offer a bookmark.
Do you really have to do all that editing of live bookmarks etc to add an RSS feed (on the 99% of sites which don't give you the little icon in the bottom right corner of the screen automatically)?
I don't think that is bias. You seem to be suggesting that if it weren't for the BBC the british would love guns just as much as the americans.
I said no such thing. "Bias" doesn't imply a deliberate attempt to shape public opinion. An unbiased news source is one that doesn't slant coverage in any direction, even if it conforms to public opinion.
In actual fact here reporting was reflecting the fact that your average man on the street in Britain is opposed to gun public ownership.
First off, I was watching the BBC World News intended for a global audience. And who cares what the average Briton thinks? The news is about facts, and facts don't change because 51% of the population disagrees with them. If the reporter wanted to discuss how Americans view guns, fine, but insinuating her own "guns, ooky" attitude into the piece was bias, plain and simple.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
I said no such thing. "Bias" doesn't imply a deliberate attempt to shape public opinion. An unbiased news source is one that doesn't slant coverage in any direction, even if it conforms to public opinion.
Oh I see, a bit like FOX news ?.
There's a problem with "TV license if you have Internet access"; vis: what format will the BBC make its work available in? And, more to the point, what systems will they support? At least all television tuners are much the same - the same cannot be said of computers.
I am not installing Windows just for the privilege of watching TV over the 'net. And if they won't make a Linux player available for whatever format they choose, I am not paying a license fee. That's not something I'm prepared to negotiate on.
BBC does have some bias, it's a bit anti-goverment, which is jsut right for a goverment sponsored broadcaster, even if it doesn't lead to one big happy familly :)
Yes, because I see the Beeb as biased, I must automatically be a Fox-drone wing-nut. Absolutely right.
Oh, no, wait, it isn't.
Sorry to disappoint you, but real people aren't stereotypes, and you can't defeat them with straw-men. I think Fox is every bit as biased as the BBC, Guardian, NY Times, or Pravda. Try again.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
Yes, they work on the priciple of saying 'Fair and Balanced' so that people believe it. To draw a nerdy parallel (this is /. after all!) my SAP program claims to be "SAP Easy Access". I don't think I've ever used a more complicated software package. Utter crap! :-D
May seem strange but I guess the British Broadcasting Corporation cares what "the average Briton thinks"!
Something is happening here but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr Jones.
At the risk of taking this further OT - Hutton Report! That's just a joke to most of us in the UK. Subsequent events have quite clearly shown how much truth there was in the assertion that our government "sexed-up" a dossier on WMD. I'd stand by my argument that the BBC is unbiased. Both the major political parties here complain about BBC bias, a pretty good indicator that it's doing a good job.
Something is happening here but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr Jones.
Seeing as New Labour is now a centre right party, wouldn't that make its news broadcasts centrist?
Sorry, but the Independent used to be an independent news source, but in recent months it's really gone downhill. I would describe myself as centre left, but a number of recent front page stories have been more pieces of opinion than news.
Well done!!! You just offended the Licence payers who live in Scotland, Wales and Northen Ireland.
You're seriously telling us that a Scot would pay his license fee?
That's not really what I had in my. I was thinking of an unified internet identity system, which is based on (a) an one-time fee, and (b) some sort of test/training course. It won't be compulsary, but websites will be free to request it, and limit their services to people who can show that they possess such a license.
Add some sort of extension to the IMAP or HTTP protocols to send this encrypted license information to the server. I don't really have a clear picture of the technical aspect.
May seem strange but I guess the British Broadcasting Corporation cares what "the average Briton thinks"!
All fine and good, but irrelevant to the question of bias. If the average Briton thinks McDonalds is an evil corporation, that doesn't mean the BBC is unbiased if it portrays Micky-Ds as an evil corporation in its coverage.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
In Economist they did a survey a while ago about political affiliation of US journalist and I recall that less then 30% of reporters consider themselves Conservative.
Which means... absolutely nothing. See, there's these people called "editors" and "programmers", and it's *their* responsibility to decide what does and does not get reported. Moreover, they're controlled by people even further up the food chain. Thus, the political affiliation of a particular reporter has essentially nothing to do with the general political bias of the media.
Yes, and I'm sure that the editors and programmers come from vastly different sources other than working originally as reporters. Thus, the editors and programmers are shiny examples of non-bias.
In fact, I'm going my own media company that hires regular reporters and uses only ex-sushi chefs to run the production room. The wisdom of someone who cuts fish all day is sometimes flooring!
Out of these:
Reuters does not put all of its stuff on the web. It is a mixed subscription + free model.
Sun is not a newspaper. It is a form of porn disguised as news. It does not serve the same audience.
The Mirror is not a newspaper. It is a form of prudish porn disguised as news. It also does not server audience that plans to read news.
Times is planning to go to a subscription model. In fact, I think they are trialing a system for charging non-UK subscribers.
This in fact leaves only the Guardian and the Scotsman who are doing guess what? Campaigning for the extermination of news.bbc.co.uk as unfair competition.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
I dont know about you, but i never sit down and take the time to watch or study screensavers. they usually appear when i'm away from the computer. in fact usually when im away poer-saving mode kicks in. in fact i fail to see any point in such frivolous eye-candy. sure you can do it, but why would you want to? plus thats just about the worst way i can imagine to view / read news. its like ads on TV.
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
Fox news also considers itself to be fair and balanced. Does that mean it is actually fair and balanced? Self-recognition means nothing.
US news is right leaning because (a) there is no left wing analogue to Fox news, (b) government has far greater degrees of control (implicit and explicit) on what reports can say. It is further right leaning, because outspoken political criticism is taboo - it simply does exist in the mainstream media.
Of course, we need major qualifiers on this. Firstly, we need to work out how this lot translates from US politics to the international scene. The US 'centre' generally maps not to the international centre but to the centre right - many of Kerry's policies would have been unacceptable to the European left. The attack that the US media is right-leaning extends beyond the media itself to the way the US political scale is calibrated. Secondly, we may have to concede that the media's right-lean may not be a right lean, but a pro-government lean - a basic lack of the skepticism used by their non-american counterparts on the left, and on the right.
There used to be an awesome screensaver for Windows 3.1 when I was a kid. It was a guy on a stranded island (that was about 20 feet wide with 1 coconut tree in the middle). He would do various comedic things. I totally forget the name of it, but it was an awesome screensaver. I used to spend loads of time just sitting there and watching what he did.
Back on topic though, I think that RSS screensaver is pretty cool. Gives me lots of ideas for future projects. For example, say you're an web page admin and you have multiple monitors. You could have it setup the so the screensaver would show graphs or other statistics related to your server(s) on one idle monitor. I'm sure this has been done before, I just havent heard about it.
Spiffy looking colours and charts would be pretty cool, kinda like seti@home, it looks neat, even if you don't have a clue what's actually going on.
Actually, the fee is only payable for televisions, radios don't need a license. BBC radio is paid for out of the TV license fee. BBC World Service radio is paid for by the government Foreign Office as a propaganda service (it does a very good job as well).
Is this evidence of a culture-biased BBC, or a culture-biased YOU not being able to get it through your head that increasing restrictions on firearms could be seen as a natural and logical result of such an occurance? An event like that in Britain would certainly have led to such calls for banning guns (google Dunblane for example), so it is an interesting aspect worth reporting on when another culture does no such thing.
Cultural bias comes from every direction there's a culture at. Many countries find American gun ownership laws bizarre in the extreme, and judging by the popularity of Michael Moore, so do quite a few Americans (note I said the popularity of Moore, wether he's right or wrong is irrespective of the point).