Common User

Photo of BBC Maida Vale studio by ‘warriorgrrrl’. Used under licence.

In 1993 Ken Garner wrote the astonishing “In Session Tonight” ; an inch thick “history of live pop at the BBC” and described by John Peel, at the time, as a work of “almost lunatic scholarship”. An academic and radio fan he worked hard with dozens of BBC archivists, producers and listeners to compile a snapshot of what is a key (but overall small) slice of the BBC archive. What sounds on the face of it a simple task; exposing publicly a full list of the bands, tracks, times and of dates broadcast for everything recorded usually inside the doors of Studio 4 (above) in Maida Vale is not as simple as just getting access to the “BBC lists” or some holy grail database which explains Peel’s accolade. If only. This became clearer when Ken returned late last year, following Peel’s death in 2004 with his follow up tome, this time devoted purely to Peel himself; “The Peel Sessions: A Story of Teenage Dreams and One Man’s Love of New Music” As he outlines in the appendix the sources for the book are varied fragments of scripts, sheets, ancient databases and catalogues..

• PASB (programme as broadcast) running order scripts held on microfilm at BBC written archives, for the years 1967-1996
• Session Sheets (1967-1996) at BBC Written Archives, more recent years held at Radio 1
• Peels production wallcharts, planners, diaries, files, notes, recollections
• BBC Infax programme archive and catalogue
• Sue Armstrong’s files of session sheets held at Strange Fruit and now Universal Music
• The (20 year old) Radio 1 Romeo computer system for logging shows, sessions and items
• The digitised Radio 1 archive of recordings
• Jon Small’s personal website of shows and sessions 1993-2001
• The members of the John Peel News group on Yahoo!
• Many individual listeners for their diaries, tapes, tape indexes etc

He also cites a “number of websites and reference books, most notably”

• The Guinness Book of British Hit Singles
• Martin Strong’s exhaustive “The Essential Rock Discography”
• Myspace for bands’ own websites to check titles and musicians.

Ken also has a fascinating rubric for how he verified the data in his book.

1. Construct from the calendar, Radio Times confirmed PASBs and existing session sheets a complete diary of Peel show broadcast dates 1967-2004 including all session data on first broadcast and repeat dates.
2. Separately enter all full session sheet data in to a basic excel spreadsheet, check errors in dates against shows diary above.
3. Check all blanks and obvious errors in both documents with reliable longstanding Peel listeners and tape collectors mainly via the John Peel News Group.
4. Check remaining gaps and inconsistencies with PASB at BBC Written archive, Romeo, BBC Infax, Radio 1 digital archive and so on.

Thats quite a feat of devotion and the reason i’ve quoted the above in length is to illustrate not so much the complexity of any media archive (radio is very patchy) but to highlight a bunch of skills much in need round my way that Garner seemingly has in abundance; Curator, Archivist, Fan, Academic and Community Manager. He also has patience. He’s been at this task for several decades already. Peel Sessions is obviously targeted at a certain middle aged male (well usually) who can virtually quote the entire Festive Fifty from 1983 and is obviously heartily recommended. However if you are thinking hard about online archives then it could be a very frustrating read indeed. Remember this is  just a catalogue. The music, if it still exists, remains distributed amongst aisles of BBC tape archives and now shared amongst handfuls of mp3 blogs and the various Peel mail lists. You mean it wasn’t in the Radio Times ? er, no.

I was tagged by Martin or rather i thought about doing it when i read his (which is what he suggested).

• I was in a little film through the window on Play School when i was 7. My whole class stopped school to watch it on TV but the teacher was upset because unknown to me, my bit had been edited down to a few seconds.
• My first paid job was a sunday paper round for which i earnt 60p when i was 12.
• I still remember watching the newsagent marking the papers up using a trusty red crayon in the back of the shop whilst it was still dark.
• I ran a indie club in the late 80s/early 90s where I gave away free apples to every one with a ticket.
• Not really understanding why i was there I nervously asked Liza Minelli in 1992 what her favourite biscuit was at a pointless film plug press conference thing. I can’t remember what she said either.
• I once produced a radio feature about people speaking Klingon that was on Pick of the Week.
• The smell of boiled eggs makes me sick.
• I’m a twin.
• A drawing of my father in law’s bull was the bull on the front label of every jar of Colman’s English mustard sold in the 70s and 80s.

You’re supposed to tag other people but the only bloggers i know have all been tagged. so i’ll skip that bit.

BBC Blogging Event
Originally uploaded by robinhamman.

We’ve been working q on upgrading the current BBC blogs platform for a few months now and as part of that work, Robin helped put together an internal event at work on Tuesday afternoon. Richard Sambrook and Graham have further accounts of what was a good afternoon.
One of the guest speakers; Jeff Jarvis, suggested at the beginning when being gently grilled by BBC tech correspondent; Rory Cellan Jones, that news organisations should be commissioned or assigned by their audience to go report on stories.

As it happens one of the guests at the back was Peter Barron, from Newsnight who it appears was quite taken with this idea. The Newsnight blog that afternoon…

You can tell our editor’s just returned from a blogging conference. Fresh faced and with fists clenched, he’s pushing another Newsnight experiment in audience participation. It’s quite simple – opening up the Newsnight running order to the people who watch us.

And so for the past three mornings; Newsnight’s daily output editor has been sharing with users their morning email to the production team outlining the potential running order for that night’s programme.

Good morning,

I’m genuinely open to any new ideas today. There are a few strong contenders for stories.

De Menezes case
The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, has rejected calls for the Metropolitan Police chief, Sir Ian Blair, to resign. He said mistakes would be made in anti-terrorist operations. Mr Livingstone said yesterday’s verdict - that the police had failed to protect the public in the operation which led to the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005 - was a ”disaster”. He said armed officers pursuing a suspected suicide bomber couldn’t afford to start thinking they might be “hauled off to court”. What approach do you think we should be taking on this story today?

I don’t know how long that NN will keep to this approach but Peter, in a comment to the blog post on wednesday highlights how the running order changed that night to include a story about lifestyle/cancer risk.

We won’t always be able to oblige - tomorrow for example we have a long film from Mark Urban in Pakistan whether you like it or not - but there’s no doubt that what you tell us will help us form our thoughts. If you’d rather leave it to us that’s fine, if you’re worried that what others say is unrepresentative get on here and lobby for what you’d like to see us do.

Radio 4’s new iPM programme has gone even further and has been sharing the actual running order from the BBC’s internal news cps for this magazine show. iPM doesn’t air for another 10 days but they’ve been doing pilots leading up to the launch. See how it changed last week.

In the very distant past (1995) I worked on a BBC radio show where in what we grandly called its “multimedia edition”
we, get this, for 1 edition only….

Listeners can ask questions live on one Internet Relay Chat channel and read a transcript of the programme on another.

I feel very old.

So Liam Gallagher is on the front cover of this month’s Mojo. I’m not sure where he stands on salami slicing or the future of Storyville but he’s quite clear about why he should stump up £15 a month.

Whats in your man bag, Liam ?

“Wallet, keys. (unzips bag and pulls out selection of envelopes and papers)
Fucking Bills. Fucking TV licence. (pulls out TV Licence form). It’s the final reminder and that’s twice they’ve sent it so i’ve got to give it to one of the girls in there [the management office]. I better get it fucking sorted ….(Bolts for the door)… or there’ll be no more Jeremy Kyle. No more fucking Spongebob. “

Today I’m on the Old Guard, New Tricks panel at the NMK Forum trying to make some sense of

“How is so-called MSM (Mainstream Media) facing up to the new wave of interest in social media? Is it absorbing social media strategies or ignoring it? What does social media mean for the bottom line of big media? And how do the social media startups view their effort”

Here are the notes that i prepared thinking about the panel. See also fellow panellist Nico MacDonald .

I haven’t got long but i hope i’ll cover off these 4 things…

• Our old “fields of dreams” focus of approaching this space, feeling compelled to “host the conversation”
• The problems of Scale that that brought us despite considerable success.
• “social objects” (ie: tv and radio programmes) and trying to understand how the network changes our stuff and shifting our focus to trying to reflect and engage with those conversations *away* from bbc.co.uk. (read Lost and ripples-Dan Hill, this analysis of Heroes by Dan Taylor)
• The challenges that brings us of the BBC having to have antennae, reflecting it back in our output (radio good at this, web pretty bad), and finally engaging whether by tools or being “part of the community”.. examples: 7 Ages of Rock, Flickr: How we built Britain, Paul Denchfield ARG for Radio 1, Andrew Marr: YouTube Group.

- I’ll try and make a quip about new tricks, and say I’m James Bolam, or Dennis Waterman which will probably be received in silence.

1. prevailing approach…

- Best summed up I’ll might quote quoting Mitchell and Webb

Are you personally affected by this issue ? Then e-mail us. Or if you’re not affected, can you imagine what it would be like if you were ? Or if you
were affected by it but don’t want to talk about it can you imagine what it would be like not being affected by it ? Why not email us ? You may not know anything about the issue, but i bet you reckon something. So why not tell us what you reckon. Let us enjoy the full majesty of your uninformed ad hoc reckoning, by going to bbc.co.uk…clicking on “what i reckon” and beating on the keyboard with your fists and your head”.

- This isn’t far off the truth for some of the BBC’s activity.
- Its what Lee Bryant calls “drive by commenting”, users not having stake in that space, the you suck, no you suck level of engagement .
- The “call to action” lacks focus.
- I agree with Nico that we aren’t using the BBC’s or journalism’s traditional skills, primarily of “hosting” in this space.
- We aren’t doing enough of what Suw Charman, in her fantastic essay about this space called “curating”

2) Why we’ve had to change - scale…and chaos..

Our approach over the last 10 years, until recently has been to host the conversation. A Field of Dreams approach..

- This has caused us challenges in terms of “publishing flow” - lose trust of users because we don’t publish their stuff or get round to even looking at it.
- moderation and cost - actually this has improved substantially at the BBC. Thousands of comments an hour are published live to the server.
- We get 1 comment every 2 seconds, around 1.5m/2m a month.
- Our blogs, forums, and community spaces like 606 get more unique users per week than Doctor Who.

We’ve also done a myriad of smallish train people with video cameras projects.
This doesn’t scale ..We need to change our approach.

3.The Chaos

Thompson Quote from BBC internal magazine; Ariel this week.

- “I’m leading the BBC in a time of extra ordinary disruption in media. It may feel pretty bumpy inside the corporation; outside both in the UK and around the media, its close to chaos. “.

Actually a better description yesterday of where we are came from Yahoo’s Tom Coates…”You’re not competing with Facebook, you’re competing with other companies *on* Facebook”

Essentially we can’t expect users to come to us. We have to go to them

4.)The Challenges

Now my notes are running out of steam but essentially we are good at being a catalyst in this space. But our focus now is reflecting and engaging with the activity. See Tom Loosemore’s 15 web principles.
These are the 2 that we need to get better at in this space.

• 6. The web is a conversation. Join in: Adopt a relaxed, conversational tone. Admit your mistakes.
• 14. Link to discussions on the web, don’t host them: Only host web-based discussions where there is a clear rationale

Tunbridge Wells station
Originally uploaded by seadipper

Broadcast has transcribed a clip from Radio 4’s That Mitchell and Webb Sound.
and included it in their back page diary. Oh yes, very funny. Grrrr.

“Are you personally affected by this issue ? Then e-mail us. Or if you’re not affected, can you imagine what it would be like if you were ? Or if you
were affected by it but don’t want to talk about it can you imagine what it would be like not being affected by it ? Why not email us ? You may not know anything about the issue, but i bet you reckon something. So why not tell us what you reckon. Let us enjoy the full majesty of your uninformed ad hoc reckoning, by going to bbc.co.uk…clicking on “what i reckon” and beating on the keyboard with your fists and your head”.

BBC Bush House in London
Originally uploaded by Redvers Kyle.

Letter to the New Statesman this week.

According to Jonathan Freedland (Inside track, 28 May), Gordon Brown’s attitude to foreign policy is influenced by economics.

I wonder, therefore, if Brown will return to the BBC World Service the millions of pounds that have been taken from its budget by successive governments from Margaret Thatcher onwards. The World Service is a national asset, trusted by its overseas audiences.

I was in Syria when Israel bombed what it thought was a Palestinian terrorist training camp near Damascus. The Syrians I was with had been listening to a radio programme of Arab music on a channel broadcast by the US when the music was interrupted by a news flash. They changed immediately to the BBC, “to find out what was going on”. In Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other parts, I have found that the BBC is revered.

If Brown wants to promote UK economic interests internationally, let him fund the World Service properly. It will be worthwhile.

Robert Hamilton
Troon, Ayrshire

Cuaderno de notas
Originally uploaded by denegro.

I did a piece for the Darren and the tech desk on Day 1 of Reboot. As ever with these things its only a fragmented/partial view of the day and just that bit of the day that i saw before i sat down and filed the thing. (already ducking for cover)

reboot 9.0
Originally uploaded by jem.

So I’ve arrived at Reboot and all I can really think of is the Human League. The morning has been full of musings from academics, developers and thinkers on what it is that makes us “human”.

Reboot is the small(ish), grassroots(ish) tech conference that was kicked off this morning by 29 year old Thomas Madsen-Mygdal who has been putting this annual gathering together in his “spare” time nearly every year this decade. His opening gambit was “it’s not us that makes it great, its you.” as the majority of presentations were suggested and voted/commented on by the attendees before the conference was scheduled. Well I’m not sure i’ve done much yet bar eat some of the free apricots and bananas…

Anyway I’m here all day/tomorrow and supposed to be filing an update for my BBC News colleagues later so i’ll better stop this and start paying attention.

After a difficult week its good to report on this. 7 Ages of Rock is a new 7 (natch) part BBC2 documentary from the people behind the excellent Soul Deep and Lost Highway . It starts on BBC2 on Saturday night but the supporting BBC website, which launched this afternoon, really starts to make use of some of Tom’s principles. Deploying for the first time (in my knowledge) at the BBC embedded video that is shareable. (see above) , aggregation of a wide range of sources (Flickr, Wikipedia, Last FM) to compile artist pages for the 50 or so bands featured in the programmes and sensible simple navigation this is quietly impressive stuff from the ever excellent team over in (what is now) the BBC team known as Audio and Music. Some of which really are now known as AM/FM. No really. Good work sirs.

Now when did “indie” actually start ? Are you sure its 1980 ?