The Â鶹Éç Backstage Christmas Party this year kicked off in fine style to the sound of 650 Charity Santa's partying.
Later in the night, once the Santa's had left by the front door instead of the Chimney it was time for the Free bar which was sponsored by our partners and .
During this time, our other partners for the night the setup their now famous mini-step ladder to recreate the speakers corner event, copyfighters.
Matthew kicked it off with a discussion about DRM followed by Cory Doctorow who gave a very good talk.
Many others joined and everyone enjoyed the slighly drunken talks. To finish off the already impressive night, on the very top floor Ryan kicked off two games of Werewolf. Some people prefer to watch or go downstairs and socialise. By 1:30am, there were a hardcore who just hung around till about 2:30am. But at 3am it was time to call it a night.
Thanks to everyone who turned up and enjoyed the night, we had a great time! And of course we at Backstage wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year in 2008. There are many exciting things being planned for the next year but I think you will agree with us that 2007 between the barcamps, hackday and other events was great.
Seriously you think this would have been easy here at beeb towers... But no... We’ve been having a bit of an internal bun fight over getting the new site (which contains a proper solution for the podcasts) live.
So..... What we’ve done is create a dedicated blip.tv channel for the backstage podcasts (and other associated media).
You can subscribe to the podcasts via this RSS feed
Alternatively you can subscribe to it via iTunes
itpc://bbcbackstage.blip.tv/rss/itunes/
(yes I know that wont work for everyone)
I hope this will make things easier for everyone :-)
Well it’s podcast time again and yesterday I got the opportunity to speak to Anthony Rose - head of all things iPlayer here at the beeb.
We managed to talk for several minutes before DRM was mentioned, but this is a great listen if you want to know a little about the man behind the future strategy and tech delivery of the Â鶹Éç's iPlayer project.
Or direct download at
As participatory culture expands, we're finding more and more uses of mashups in places we'd never expected. Â鶹Éç Radio 4 is not exactly the place you would expect mashups but recently Eddie Mair asked his listeners to send in their postcodes, so he could plot them on a Google Map for all to see.
This week, on our sister programme PM we're launching a brand new experiment.
All you need to know is the postcode you're in when you listen to PM. If you're travelling when we're on the air, we'll happily accept your best guess as to your postcode, or the rough location. If you're overseas, try the local postcode or zipcode.
You're probably wondering what we're going to do with this information. Well, on iPM on Saturday we're going to start to build a map showing where people are listening to PM.
Then just email your postcode to this address: ipm@bbc.co.uk Please put POSTCODE in the subject line.
After Eddie and the team start work on their mashup, they will be releasing the same data (more that 10,000 postcodes) under the backstage license for all you backstagers to create even better mashups, widgets or even visualisations. Who knows what could be done with a GPS, Radio 4 stream and this audience aggregated Geodata?
One of the lesser talked about issues recently has been accessibility. The web has moved on quite a bit in recent years but it seems like we may be making some of the same mistakes we made back in 1999. This Backstage podcast includes Julie Howell, Andy Budd, Katherine Moonan, Gareth Ford Williams, Nick Holmes and Jonathan Chetwynd. Thanks to them for making this very difficult area of web development/design lively and positive.
You can download the podcast in here or here. There is also high quality versions and embed options . The podcast is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial, so your welcome to make derivative versions which includes subtitled versions or even full text transcripts. If you do, please let us know about the version
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