A friend of mine shared a new company with me (new to me I guess) Check out www.popmorphic.com . Their focus is on music videos currently, but I think there is something rather magical about this offering.  - I'm going to learn more - but my 1st thought was that we could use this to allow audiences of something like BBC Archive, to mashup or recombine videos into new elements - similar to a concept called Creative Archive, which has been drifting around for a while..

Products like garage band and this bring amazingly powerful creative tools to the masses.  Just like recording technology did at the beginning of my career.  The creation of the home studio brought us a flood of mediocre new age demo tapes -but it also brought us some amazing creativity, like Beck & Moby in the pop world. Personally I love the idea that technology can be a facilitator to bringing more people to the creative process.  Given the chaos in our world right now, this can only be a good thing - I can't wait for the outcome.

Thoughts anyone?

Search and Content Discovery

• Richard Titus
• 26 Sep 08, 2:00 PM

A few months ago, I gave one of the keynotes at our annual BBC Future Media & Technology conference.

I ended my speech, which ranged from an overview of the evolution of user interaction models on technology to cloud computing and the semantic web, with a picture of the Google search window...

...and the statement:

All this innovation, and yet this is the best we can currently do for content discovery: brute force text search. We have to do better if we want to evolve.

Okay, it was for dramatic effect, but I believed then and believe now that I was absolutely accurate.

Search is one of the darkest backwaters of technological and experience development (particularly on the internet.) Since then, I've been thinking a lot about how we, the BBC, can improve search on our site, and how we can drive innovation around search in general in the industry.

Earlier this month, there were a couple of really interesting launches in the world of search.

First, Yahoo! released Boss, which is a completely open, virtually limit-free search API. What's interesting about this is that it's a brilliant defensive move against Google's dominance.

Yahoo! is clearly Number Two, but since it's a marginally zero sum game in terms of monetisable search traffic, it needs a different way to take market share. "Embrace and extend", indeed.

This was followed almost immediately by Cuil, a Xoogle (ex-Google employee company - more about that later) which launched to much fanfare, and mostly collapsed into a mess of unmet audience expectations - always risky.

Frankly, I haven't played with it enough to make a decision, but it wasn't nearly as compelling as the rest of those mentioned in this post.

I was lucky enough to join Jane Weedon, our controller of business development, on a trip to Asia and to the USA to do some learning about small, young innovative companies and market trends.

In the realm of "oh my god, that looks like rocket science", we file Viewdle. Essentially, it's an image search engine with facial recognition software.

Born in the Ukraine out of what I suspect was a largely military development effort, the technology is funded by Anthem, a SoCal VC and frankly, after a thirty minute demo, I was blown away.

See for yourself at reuters.viewdle.com/searchm. I'm keen to spend more time on this, and feel like there's an unknown number of ways to leverage this.

One of my favourite meetings from Asia was Naver, the Korean search giant owned by the largest online gaming portal in Korea (another interesting space for a blog).

With near 80% market share in Korea (Google has less than 4%!), 16m people visit Naver every day. They have managed to capture and data cache the majority of Korean language content on the internet.

Now, to my non-Korean-speaking western eye, this is a confusing, hard-to-understand site, but there are some really keen innovations here:

• They mix different kinds of results into an answer, presenting only relevant ones
• Their scrap tool (sort of like social bookmarking à la digg or delicious) allows users to copy parts of one blog or site onto another, helping to grow the interconnectedness of the interweb and building relevance
• Behind Naver is an engine of editorial staff who review
• They have a Google Answers- or Yahoo! Knowledge-like offer which helps to identify new subjects and content to deep dive on
• Other than the aforementioned editorial staff, which is outsourced to low-cost centres like China, the company is run by a team of just over 80 people who are amazingly innovative and agile
• They also have JR Naver kids' search

Interestingly, US-based Mahalo lists Naver as its biggest inspiration. They have duplicated the Naver editorial model, but built it up into an amazing engine of content discovery and improvement.

Mahalo creates pages about selected subjetcs using its amazing editorial/ curation team which is distributed around the world . Their page curators, who come from all walks of life - professors, doctors, homemakers - create the pages for a nominal sum (under fifty quid) per page. It's a model similar to Wikipedia, but managed (ie, you have to demonstrate your skills and you are evaluated regularly to assess the quality of your work).

It is an interesting alternative to the approach taken by Daylife and others (including the BBC with its Topic Pages - previously blogged here) where pages are produced automatically using search queries to find and aggregate content. This is obviously cheaper and computers can find much more content than human editors ever could. But Mahalo's pages have a hand-built quality that can only be produced by skilled editors and well thought out workflows.

Co-founder and CEO (and a long-time friend of mine) Jason Calcanis talks about how this makes his content more "trusted"; which I think is a really interesting concept.

His new line, which I'll repeat here, is that trust is one of the most important currencies/assets in the digital future. Frankly, I'd put it up there with metadata.

Digital has a function of changing the nature and assets in the future. Attention, data and trust, rather than cash and inventory: brave new world, indeed.

Mahalo is a Sequoia investment. I was lucky enough, with some colleagues from the BBC and Sony, to attend a Sequoia open day in SF. It's essentially a beauty parade by the VC of their best and brightest (and most relevant) investments for larger strategic or VIP friends and family.

One of the most compelling things they showed us was SearchMe, which I was quite impressed by. Essentially, it's a combination of a new search engine (built by Xooglers) with a new, Flash-based interface.

Now, the interface borrows heavily from Apple's interaction pattern library and it's a bit clunky for browsing, but it is quite striking.

I find that it's also really good at predicting what I'm looking for, with a few exceptions. I see pieces of the old snap search engine (the creative director, Jason Fields, just joined us at the BBC) as well as X1 (long may it live - one of the most useful tools ever).

Frankly, however, it really shone when they loaded up the Searchme Ap on my iPhone. Oh MY GOD! WOW. Extremely compelling search on a phone (it replaces the internal search and I don't miss it a bit.)

I'm converted, though they need some slightly better browse mechanisms (see what Apple did in the newest version of iTunes.)

Cuil has some interesting visual metaphors as well: the blue type, minimalist and frankly ugly and not very usable Google UX seems to be crumbling!

I really think that the next two years will be defined by those of us who can really raise the efficiency of discovery (both targeted - ie, I know what I want, and browsing/snacking - ie, I'm looking for something stimulating).

When you marry solid data and indexing (everyone forgets that Google's code base is almost ten years old), useful new datapoints (facial recognition, behavioral targeting, historical precedent, trust, etc) with a compelling and useful user experience, we may see some changes in the market leadership of search.

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

So I hosted an away day at the BBC for the entire User Experience & Design teams + a few extra's.  About 160 people in all. We had it at the Magic Circle, which I thought was quite appropriate - more and more User Experience seems to one part magic to two parts science; wrapped in artistry and a bit of luck.

I went 1st and ranted on my favorite points lately:
1 -  The fact that the BBC needs to sort out its digital content strategy.
2 - The fact that we (the BBC) have no real relationship as a brand with audiences in the post CBBC pre BBC News demographic (that's 11-24 for those of you who cares).
3 - A thing I call the public service platform, where I think the BBC should re-order a bunch of its digital works/technology/services to provide platforms for public & private organizations, including startups, to build businesses on top of its digital services.

You'll here a bunch more about the latter one as these three feed most of what I'm thinking about for us for the next year.

We had two external thinkers Mat Hunter, from Ideo (see photo) who was great, and Clive Grinyer from Cisco (formerly from Orange).  We talked a lot about the evolution of product & service development into design, a bit about how user centered design & a touch of naivety place designers (in the broadest sense of things) in a great place to design and develop products.  In essence, our disconnection from business or technology limitations makes us focus 1st on what the audience wants, 2nd on how they will use it - then we manage back the technical and business issues from there.

Interestingly we talked a lot about the issues facing the BBC, one of the  topics I sent people away to think about was "How can we make the BBC the most creative place to work? - which isnt' it now?"

- most of what we got back was the usual (though likely truer at the current bbc) more training, more tools, more time to be creative, more people...

But most interesting to me was that we heard, from people on the periphery of my team; more leadership, more clear decision making (they actually said  benevolent dictatorships!) and in private afterwards someone said to me, they want more people like me ! While flattered I feel like there's something here in general. People want a leader who makes decisions, quick, concise, and effective ones. They want clarity of purpose, and they want to be given the time, space  & resources to get on with executing that vision.

UX&D is very empowered these days - bit of a change management infection starting to spread... - I hope.

"...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.

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.

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.

This is a shameless cross-post from my friend and collegue James Cridland, link below:

Hi all. been traveling and working too much.. we finally launched the new homepage.. lots of people hating on us on the Internet blog and would love your feedback...  Http://www.bbc.co.uk

The funny thing is the blog they are posting on is the BBC internet blog, I wonder how many of them are BBC people...

I think I recognize some of those email typos "tell"s (poker reference)

read here.
 http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/02/new_homepage_goes_live_1.html

best

From Wired:

"Should Web Giants Let Startups Use the Information They Have About You?

Just after 10 am on June 7, 2007, Ryan Sit glanced at his Gmail inbox and saw the message he had been waiting nine months to receive. Sit, a 29-year-old software developer from San Diego, is the founder of Listpic, a site that used bots — automatic software-based agents — to pull images from craigslist for-sale listings and reorganize them into an easier-to-navigate, more attractive format. Instead of tediously clicking individual links to view photos, Listpic users could see them all collected onto a single page. The service was an instant success, and by early June it was pulling in more than 43,000 visitors a day and thousands of dollars a month in Google AdSense revenue...."

Great article, read the whole thing..

This is a topic I'll be doing quite a bit of blogging on this year. Particularly I'm thinking a lot about what this means as we begin to mine this data to create better and better user experiences. So if it's on the web - is it free? How can we make our audiences into our best distributors? How can we not repeat the mistakes of the music business in the new economy? What rights do copyright holders, authors, musicians, writers have over their content.. Do they get a say in how their work is used? How can we guarantee/protect their right to participate in monies generated by new forms/uses.

In my music business days we used to ask artists to sign contracts that talked about licensing their work, "in any and all media known and unknown, or hereafter invented throughout the universe, in perpetuity." I used to think that just meant we intended to corner the market on CD's on Venus.  Now when I think about mash-ups, sampling, DJ's, iplayers, etc. it feels to me like we missed the point entirely. 

Then there is user data, metadata.. the detrius of a digital life. if you took my cookies files, amazon wish list, click-paths and 1/2 a dozen or so playlists from my last FM scrobble you would have a very odd picture of me. Mix that up with other data and data mining becomes very very strange. I saw Jeff Bezos give a talk about the 'my Tivo thinks I'm gay" phenomena at web 2.0.. his feeling was that this was a self correcting proble. Bad data = bad sales = correct alogrythm,= better data. I think he's largely right on that. 

But in his mind, you come into his store, your behavior belongs to him - end discussion.  To me it's more complicated. I think it's fine if you collect that data, especially in aggregate from your property. I think it's fine if you use it to improve your product offerings/suggestions to me. Tone down the tampax commercials give me more gadget stuff - oh yea and music more music. Less Cricket. 

On the other hand, when this data starts to build up, collect, get rusty and frankly out of date (my Synth pop Aha historical phase is largely over for those of you who share my lastfm friends list..) How can we keep this current, and how  do I prevent this information from being used in a way which hurts me, or even breaks my personal privacy (I mean come on, we all like at least ONE Neil Diamond song.

Basically, we need a framework, set of rules around this - and we all need to agree them. I'm a huge fan of the work Creative Commons have done in this area but we need a lot more. At the BBC we talk a lot about this these days, particularly as we exist to serve the public and their interest.  we aren't selling you anything, except maybe that the BBC is valuable and you should continue to support it.  More on this in future blogs.