Just before leaving the BBC, Tom Coates completed – along with what looks like a very very strong team – a superb project that brings collaborative annotation to BBC content. If that project were brought to production it would allow people to segment, annotate and tag media from the BBC collection in much the same way Wikipedia is being written. Not only are the ideas behind that brilliant, the execution looks to be at the same level.
This is more Web 2.0 than 90% of the companies launching these days and 10 times more interesting. Not only am I hoping “The Beeb” brings us a live version but I’m also praying that it then makes it to other media outlets.
Bit of a sidenote; In august Tom was showing another BBC R&D project, Phonetags and last week Ben Hammersley mentioned hot BBC archive action with Matt Biddulph. The brits seem to be light years ahead of other public television, or even private tv for that matter. The only other forward thinking work I can think of is Cringely’s Nerd TV.
Do you know of any other projects and, more importantly, any idea where the hell is the CBC? A few podcasts and some nice Flash work at Radio 3 (ironically, awaiting a relauch). That’s about it. Dismal.