Merry Christmas from Â鶹Éç Backstage
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Â鶹Éç Backstage.
Ian Forrester
Matthew Cashmore
Jeremy Stone
Archives for December 2006
Infax: Programme Catalogue prototype is back
https://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue
Details of 966,244 Â鶹Éç programme dating back to 1938, categorised into
503,193 subject categories, and mapped onto 1,214,797 contributors.
Its chock full of RSS, RDF and FOAF
it's a creation and done with Ruby on Rails.
So go, play and enjoy...
Daq Syndication Update
Our Celebdaq & Sportdaq syndication notes released at the beginning of this year have received a warm response from users, so, for the benefit of Backstage, Ian Forrester has asked me to write a few notes to summarise the tools the have been built by players using the advertised feeds (or otherwise) in the games short history.
Some of this stuff is hosted on MSN, so you may be prompted to login and join the groups to access the tools.
- At , Simon has provided a fantastic set of data tables and graphs that allow players to track short-term changes in the Celebdaq markets, views of the data that the bbc.co.uk site doesn't provide. Originally the site scraped the data from our CGI servers but this has kindly been migrated over to pulling in the static XML feeds.
-
The second useful thing is Sandman's suite of Excel and Java tools that can be found on , one of the MSN groups dedicated to the game. Notably, is a Java application to undertake various transactions and multiple account management from your desktop. We've not released information about how to interface with the transactional parts of the game so this might have been quite painful to create.
A few people seem to have gone to the effort of building tools to mask the awkward parts of the game, or the parts of the game where our interface is broken, ie. doesn't support the users intentions well. Like owning multiple portfolios is legal under the game rules but our UI doesn't make an effort to support it. We can learn a lot from this.
- Ultimates also provides for it is users of some of the main RSS files via a service called , like for some of the editorial information available via RSS, as well as some more interesting that have annotations as to why market activity is happening around a particular issue (eg. Eddie Murphy dumps Mel B!).
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There's a quite a few very active community run forums for both games (mostly on MSN - search for CelebdaqUltimates, SportdaqTalk, CelebdaqBasements, CelebdaqRetreat etc... ) that provide user guides, game walkthroughs, competitions, and tips. For example, (using ) is a excellent recent occurrence. A lot of these sites also host a variety of Excel spreadsheets to help player analyze their portfolios, again register with MSN to see them.
One of our oversights in releasing this information is that lack of XSLT (or other) views of the raw XML. However, those who lurk in the various Daq communities were well served by the more technical users who provided help & support and the tools mentioned above, greatly improving the accessibility of the information.
- We've also had a glimpse of a few private projects that use the RSS and XML data, including these nice looking , again generated from previously unreleased information in the XML feeds.
There's also been a couple of interesting projects that are sadly no longer with us.
- Firstly, the much missed , a set of reports again capturing a finer grain detail of the short-term market, and tools for downtrading and league management.
- Secondly, provided a simple interface to some of the game functionality. I can't find a copy of this program anywhere, but from memory you could do simple things like grab your portfolio listings, fetch the latest issue prices etc.
I hope that's been an interesting whistle-stop tour to players and non-players alike. If you fancy a play (where the benefits of the above tools will become even more apparent!) then you can sign up for either game at the sportdaq or celebdaq bbc.co.uk websites.
Matt Chadburn, December 2007
Summary of the Â鶹Éç Backstage London Christmas Bash
Thank you to everyone who turned up and made this our most successful event to date.
We had started very early on Saturday afternoon packing bags thanks all and helped out before the doors opened.
We did open the doors on time and did turn some people away because they were not on the main guest list, which was a big regret on our part but those were the rules we specified in the emails. After 8pm the venue was open for anyone who wanted to enter.
Once we said a few welcome and thanks speeches it was back on with the party and a night of endless chatting and djs playing all types of music. There was even some so called dancing...
Our goodie bags were packed with stuff and enjoyed by the people who came to the bash. Everyone also got one of our new Backstage T-shirts, which went down well.
There was some interviews at the event, which were done by Chris Vallance (from Radio 5 Live's Pods and Blogs). We've put them online for your listening enjoyment
We have received some fantastic feedback...
Â鶹Éç Backstage London Christmas Bash <ins>Final list</ins>
Date: Saturday 9th December
Time: 1830 - 0100
Venue: The Cuban, Citypoint
Address: One Ropemaker Street, London,
Nearest Tube: Moorgate
Cost: Free
This community event is put together with the generous help and support of,
Our community partners
Swedish Beers
London Girl Geekdinners
London Geekdinners
London Perlmongers
London Webstandards Group
London Ruby user group
Open rights group
London 2.0
Mobile Monday
LondonSEO
And Our Sponsors
TrustedPlaces.com
Skills Matter
Chinwag
TechCrunch UK
O'Reilly
AdMob
ConnectMeAnywhere.com
If your travelling from outside of London and need somewhere to stay, please check out or cheap hotels in Kings Cross, Liverpool Street.
If your blogging or tagging content for the night please include at least one of these tags "bbcbackstage", "bbcbackstagebash" and "londonxmasbash".
The dress code is dress to impress (whatever you feel like wearing). And we have Dj's Jem, Digital Italic, Alexander, Muffinresearch and Cashmore playing a variety of music later in the night.
If you would like to help out and your on the main list please check out the .
Â鶹Éç Backstage T-Shirts are here
Yes at long last, the new Â鶹Éç Backstage Tag Cloud T-shirts are here. Don't forget to get one for yourself at the Â鶹Éç Backstage London Christmas Bash on Saturday.
Inspire
Just in time for our new look and the Christmas Bash, say hello to our giant size tag cloud banners. Yes we love them very much. Thanks goes out to for the tag cloud idea and Matthew for Inspire. The Art work was done with Inkscape by myself Ian. If you love this look, wait till you see the new T-shirts.
Interview with the producers of Â鶹Éç Backstage
. We discuss many things including Second Life, AV, iPlayer and even .
Ian Forrester and Matthew Cashmore of Â鶹Éç Backstage, the Beeb's developer network, talked to us about the challenges and opportunities of opening up your data to third parties.
