MikeNF (FMA Admin)

In awesome creative commons news, the BBC has come out with a new web show called R&DTV, made specifically to be remixed, rechopped, and reused. The show is, in their own words, "a monthly technology programme made up of interviews from knowledgeable BBC developers, BBC project experts and experts from around the world." and they've gone out of their way to promote the CC license while they're at it. The show is available in just about any format you could want (Ogg Theora, flash, quicktime, .avi, .mkv, .mp4), as an rss feed from their ftp site. , and on youtube. Serious brownie points for Ogg Theora.

The show's website above has a lot more info, but the first episode features Kevin Rose (from digg, for those new to the internet) and Nicholas Negroponte (founder of OLPC). The cinematrogophy is pretty tight, and there are plenty of soundbites and video sequences to be mined for fun, the segment on surround video is particularly good. Even if it's not exactly as rich a resource as, let's say, The Colbert Report, it's still a pretty fantastic precedent. The effort is impressive, especially for a pilot episode, and I cannot wait to see what they put into #2.

The BBC departments behind the project are RAD (rapid application development) and BBC Backstage, both of which merit some exploration (that means you should click to read more).

BBC Backstage's home is here, and has a lot more relevant info about all of the things they're working on. Backstage is a subdivision of BBC RD (Research and Development), which is also worth visiting eventually. The raddest (forgive me) of the three groups behind this is RAD though. RAD's blog is here, and they have a lot of info on the R&DTV project.

Not only that, but RAD has been working on another project called URIplay. Honestly, I can't explain it any better than they have in their blog post here and in their illustrated overview here. In short, it's a fantastic tool for finding, organizing, and distributing media online by aggregating the sources for a particular piece of media into one, centralized, collection of data. Right now it's most useful to developers, but I imagine it will be a great media source for end users very soon. Best of all, the entire project is open source and public domain. That means there are no restrictions whatsoever on its use and anyone can see the code behind it.

RAD and the rest of these BBC groups are doing some amazing things for open source nerddom, and the people behind these projects deserve a lot of credit. Please go to their sites, check them out, and spread the word.