rxdxt’s blog

"...mature artists steal."

--Lionel Trilling, Esquire, Sept 1964, quoting Eliot^†

The fine line between your influences and outright plagiarism is getting finer indeed.

In the music world, people are mashing up music from previously made recordings, performing and "reinterpreting" other artists' work: Danger Mouse's Grey Album and artists like Nouvelle Vague, Richard Cheese and many others have demonstrated this to phenomenal effect.

So when my team in user experience and design started seeing other groups building sites which were similar to, inspired by, or in one case a borderline copy of the BBC homepage, (SSIs and all), they waited to see what the Yank from the land of litigious copyright lawyers would do (that's me, by the way).

Frankly, I found myself - as did most of the team - mildly flattered, and even challenged.

Composite image by Ryan Morrison

The first site I saw was the Croatian site. I thought: "Wow, from a design standpoint that's quite similar to ours - there are some interesting tweaks as well." A week or so later, I saw the RTL Hungary site. Seeing these two, so close in time, I found myself quite intrigued.

I believe inspiration can come from a variety of sources. Some of the inspiration for the BBC homepage included a diverse array of sites across the web, but I wonder what Google, Pageflakes, Facebook and CNN think about BBC.co.uk/home.

I know what Netvibes thinks about it: co-founder and CEO Tariq Kim and I talked about it extensively.

He felt our adoption of a similar experience/interaction model to Netvibes and Pageflakes (his arch-rival) simply helped to demonstrate the real impact of widgets, modular content delivery, rss/xml and personalisation. "A rising tide lifts all boats" was essentially his message.

I agree with him. Each iteration of a technology and/or approach creates new opportunities to innovate (or riff, if we are still using musical terms) on that idea with one of your own. In many ways, the BBC's adoption of Web 2.0 thinking, personalisation and widgets helped to break down barriers at other organisations. Audience desire for personalisation was estimated as a niche offer before the BBC demonstrated that +30% (+50% of the beta) of our unique users personalise their experience in some way. To me, this audience engagement is the real success story of the homepage.

Here are a few facts about personalisation of the new BBC homepage:

• +30% of global unique users personalise it in some way
• Most popular module combinations and positions:
    (1) News + Weather + Sport + TV + CBBC + Radio + iPlayer + Blogs
    (2) News + Weather+ Sport + TV + CBBC + Radio per week
• Most added / opened modules:
    (1) News
    (2) Sport
    (3) Blogs
  
• 
  
• Most deleted / minimised modules:
    (1) CBBC
    (2) News 
  
• (3) Sport

One of the most popular positioning changes is swapping Sport for News. Here are the default and most popular customization positions:

• removing the blogs module and the iPlayer module
• opening the CBBC module, and moving it into the second column
• TV at top of column 2 (chicken and egg here - I don't know whether users moved down weather, leaving TV to go up "naturally", or vice versa)
• Moving the weather module down to the bottom of row 2 and minimising it

Remember, these are international figures. iPlayer, Radio and TV aren't as relevant to many of those audiences - but the figures are still fascinating. News and sport seem to be very polarising elements of the BBC's offering; our children's content is likely most interesting if you are or have a child! And due to licensing restrictions, BBC iPlayer is only available/useful in the UK.

We're collecting lots of really great data from the homepage and trying to use them to inform our choices for things to improve and things that work well and, across the BBC, to assess new editorial offerings.

But back to the influences and copies. On the whole, I'm flattered that someone thought what we have done to be important enough to influence their work. It means that we've done something important, or at least opened some people's minds somewhat. Mary Meeker, a financial analyst in the US, said that she was surprised that, of all the media companies in the world, it was the BBC that innovated so clearly into the personalised audience-engaged homepage.

But my friends at news organisations apparently discuss our homepage a lot. Even TechCruch's Michael Arrington talked about it on US television. Maybe we've demonstrated demand for something many of them didn't really expect would be compelling: an opinion I suspect they are reconsidering.

I've travelled and even lived quite extensively in Eastern Europe, including Hungary, and I was blown away by the depth of knowledge and passion around internet technology there. So the fact that web developers from two different Eastern European countries - both with healthy web development and IT and design communities - picked us as a primary influence on their work to revamp media portals says to me that we've done something right.

Some of their peers berated them for their work, but I say: thanks! There are times when the BBC lawyers must defend the BBC's rights for all kinds of good reasons, but my personal opinion is that these examples help to drive creativity and innovation in a way that we should embrace.

I've always felt that design, software and music have a lot in common. When musicians jam, they sit around and riff off each other. They write songs together collaboratively, in the room, each inspiring the other to take it to a new interesting place. Other times, you get an idea in your head from the session, but go home and end up personalising it, composing it into a complete tune and making it your own. We each take our inspiration from many things, so to lock up creativity and ideas is to me the biggest danger of copyright law.

Frankly, on a personal level, I've always given my ideas away, often for free or with little or no compensation. My lawyer friends make fun of this, but I feel most ideas are ephemeral. It's the hard work of iterating them into something truly useful and refining, and revamping again and again that's the art, the science and the fun.

There is something else to point out about the homepage - something that most of the sites also picked up on and then used in some way. The code.

Behind the amazing design the User Experience team developed for the homepage is some amazing, well crafted code delivered by the our CSD team (in record time, I might add - less than four months from idea to delivery!). As is always the case with good code, it is invisible to the user - technology as a means not an end.

However, the code which powers the homepage, with its SSIs and legacy Perl issues, is really some pretty amazing stuff. It just works: it's clean, fast and accessible and the user doesn't even know that it's there. At the BBC, we are currently working on code libraries (like our Glow library, which will be used in the forthcoming new beta homepage) and public-facing design and code pattern libraries.

This is publicly funded work and, where there is a clear benefit to the public, let's try to make it available to the public to personalise and to make their own. Perhaps we can eventually evolve this into an open source code library - we already have BBC Open Source where we release material like this. In my humble opinion, this is a great expression of our public purpose and, frankly, an interesting thing to do.

In closing, I'll share my favourite of the sites which bear uncanny similarities to our homepage. It uses quite a bit of our amazing code - it's for Little Ilford School in East London. Next generation education indeed.

Richard Titus is Head of User Experience & Design for FM&T.

Which cultural festivals will you be attending this summer?

My Kids summer garden party, Glastonbury and maybe, if I'm lucky, Burning Man... 

So I've given three BIG presentations this week. One to the entire future media team at the BBC about the future circa 2012. One today for a group of Sr. management consulting strategists - and one virtually to a group of lawyers about environmental film making.  I have to say, the the one made me the most nervous was the BBC one, it's always tough to present to 1000 of your peers when they HAVE to be there. I always find audiences who've paid a grand to see you are much more cooperative.

It went well, I'll post the presentation online someplace this weekend if you're interested post here and tell me.  I also went to a visionary - leadership conference hosted by Ad Network Tradedoubler. I have to say it was GREAT!

My favourite two speakers were Richard Eyre, who in addition to making lots of witty "Long Tail" references made some great connections between the ethos of Punk Rock and blogging/social networking.. Great stuff.

Then Ray Hammond, who I personally adore, jumped up and explained that he was from the future..  It's a fun schtick and I thought he had a few interesting things to say, particularly I LOVED his simple summary of the principals businesses and entrepreneurs (ok i'm paraphrasing) need to pay attention to in regards to the next 25 years

I The most important principals influencing our future - according to Ray Hammond

1 - world population explosion: 2030 = 8.2 billion, 2050 = 9-12 biillion

2 - climate change: extreme weather wreaks havoc on economy

3 - energy crisis: oil used in plastic and petrochemicals is 8% the remainder is burned for combustion. The 8% is worth, economically speak as much as the 92% !

4 - globalization: ethical/sustainable is a god thing. 2 billion new consumers protect economic opportunity!

5 - extend & prevent: medical technology, dna profiling, nano medicine.

6 - accelerating and exponential technology development . Moores law has shrunk from 18 to 12 months, 2030 computers 1 billion times more powerful..

7 - mobile, embedded, implanted, personalized virtual device, avatar, phone replacement. Your interface with the world.

8 - the bottom billion, who have NO access to the above. Source of future war & terrorism

Heady stuff!!! But thank God I'm back from the future, I need to go to bed - I'm exhausted from all this time travel.

The most important principals influencing our future - according to Ray Hammond

1 - world population explosion: 2030 = 8.2 billion, 2050 = 9-12 biillion

2 - climate change: extreme weather wreaks havoc on economy

3 - energy crisis: oil used in plastic and petrochemicals is 8% the remainder is burned for combustion. The 8% is worth, exonomically speak as much as the 92% !

4 - globalization: ethical/sustainable is a god thing. 2 billion new consumers protect economic opportunity!

5 - extend & prevent: medical technology, dna profiling, nano medicine.

6 - accelerating and exponential technology development . Moores law has shrunk from 18 to 12 months, 2030 computers 1 billion times more powerful..

7 - mobile, embedded, implaneted, personalized virtual device, avatar, phone replacement. Your interface with the world.

8 - the bottom billion, who have NO access to the above. Source of future war & terrorism

Heady stuff!!!

.

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So Chris Anderson has given me my new favorite quote of the week.

I spend a lot of time wrestling with both the power of Social Media and with the inane time-wasting most of it encourages..  I sense there's something powerful there, but wrestle with Wisdom of Crowds, vampire-kiss-of-facebook-uselessness.   Jury is still out on what/why this is important long-term. We all know I agree with him on the long tail niche content theme - won't belabor it here.

One interesting stat lately. In looking at the behaviors of our younger demo at the BBC, we've noticed that email is primarily the domain of old people (i.e. +25) employed, higher earning and retired.

Young people use IM, facebook/myspace. They think email is quaint.. and useless. Maybe this is an age thing? maybe Facebook is the new eudora ?

BTW I'm relatively intrigued by Twhirl - which I use in conjunction with Twitter & Friend Feed. It's rapidly making me like FF more - especially as I integrate it everywhere else - facebook, here, etc.

I'm with Michael Arrington - I want unity of my messaging & social networks. But with Avatar control... like personalities. Just like a human, I want to have different expressions of myself while unifying my control of those selves and selective publishing of their content..  My facebook, myspace, blog, linkedin & even a few others you might not know about selectively share pieces of me with groups of my associates/friends/acquaintances and random people I don't even know. I think that's wonderful and I wouldn't change the different aspects of me I share with them:
- Linkedin says highly successful serial tech entrepreneur with a big Rolodex
- Facebook says adventure sports loving father of two
- Myspace says .com filmmaker possibly confused about age appropriate content/behavior ( I haven't touched it since my last sabbatical)

None of these is problematic until you try and link my myspace to my linkedin with no filters or controls.  there's lots of people messing about with solutions to this headache, but many of them miss the point. the issues are:
- I want to enter my data once. (cue open id)
- I want to update once and change everywhere (ibid, maybe)
- I want to control where and when I publish my data..  (creative commons?)
- and to whom

Lots of partials, no full solution. Feels like a start up for somebody, but not me - I have a big British website that needs lots of sorting out and thinking about.

So I had dinner with my dear friend, and Lawrence Lessig's mortal enemy, Chris Castle last night at Benares.  First off, that is definitely one of the best nouveau Indian restaurants in history... amazing meal and fascinating conversation. He's quite active - opposed to Lawrence of course - on the Orphan works/copyrights.  Talking to him made the debate much more interesting to me - especially in consideration that my wife and I own quite a few copyrights between us.  His take on libraries and schools is quite interesting too - essentially free use for ANY non commercial use for works which were already public... but the catch is how to define libraries and museums and to avoid the GOOGLE MUSEUM locking up materials. 

Essentially the question is, how hard should people be made to work to find copyright owners, and should the lack of ability to find them make the works unusable.  When we made Who Killed the Electric Car? we had serious issues on this due to our desire to use some footage of which provenance was at best hazy. It's a very real issue in the world of digital where everything has potential permanence.  At the BBC, we think about this a lot vis a vis the Archive.  Many of the rights holders in some of that material would be quite hard to find or could actually be quite in need of compensation.  Personally, I come down in the middle some place: I think content should be able to be experienced, and that there should be simple ways to find/register copyrights as well as simple ways to set aside part of revenues for future claims.   But I don't think we should lock anything up in a vault. Vaults are cold dark places and frankly I'm claustrophobic.

So this a.m., since my foot is still quite swollen, I was drifting around the blogosphere and suddenly remembered I'd suggested going to Burning man with an old friend. The idea is recapturing momentum in my small brain. I think I'm going to go, I need a break, a solo break with 20,000 of my closest non-friends.. and a few close ones. My fear is that it's just a mid life crisis rearing its head - but optimistically I think I need some spiritual/mental space.

It could be a blast - given the right group of friends.. hmmm...

So lately I'm addicted to current TV. I'm watching a doc on hare krishna's right now. Always interesting, progress bar at the bottom of the screen, non-linear tangental thinking... It reminds me of the web circa 1993.

But with video

There is something special here.

So I got an email today.. RTL has just launched their new website...

http://www.rtl.hu/

feels pretty similar to

http://www.bbc.co.uk

We were all quite flattered.

So many people know that the last couple of years have had some pretty amazingly extreme highs and lows.  They also know that I've struggled with my nature, good & evil.. 

One of my favourite johnny cash songs is a song called "The Beast in Me":

A Cherokee Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner:
 
"Inside of me there are two wolves. One of the wolves is mean and evil. The other wolf is good. The mean wolf fights the good wolf all the time."  When asked which wolf wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, "The one I feed the most." (reference 1, 2)

I often struggle internally between the part of me that wants to fight, crush, kill, defend and win at any cost, with the one that wants to empower, inspire and protect.  I was getting a massage today and just thinking on this.. I think we largely are in control of these forces of dark and light inside us, but like the children in the Freddy Krueger films, we forget we are free to wake up  from the bad dreams..

So I have a sinus infection, actually apparently a rather nasty one. in fact I don't seem to get rid of it.  I was supposed to fly today on a trip for a week, but went to see the doc this a.m. to get some drugs to keep the sinus' clear. Instead he forbade me to fly.. saying "well, you could fly, but that'd be about the stupidest thing you could do" so now I'm here in London - for a bank holiday weekend...

Actually so far, I've rolled around my bed with my daughters, had a tea party, read a pop-up jungle book with them. Now I'm watching them sleep.