Two articles in The Grauniad strike particularly close to home today.
First up Danny O’Brien with more on the BBC, and particularly the Creative Archive idea.
"And if the BBC takes this route, it will have the biggest, most responsive file-distribution on the planet to help shift this treasure trove of material: the file-sharing networks. Presenting its archive material without restrictions would allow the BBC to occupy a niche that no other commercial company would dare to assume. It would allow them to tap a vast distribution system that no other company feels confident enough to use. It would serve a public good, in refilling the public domain diminished by companies attempting to restrict their customers’ use of their works."
Can’t say too much about this at the mo, for obvious reasons, but the situation is slightly more complex than Danny makes clear – but that’s probably a problem with the format of the newspaper article rather than any failing on Danny’s part. He clearly gets the opportunity afforded by this idea, that’s for sure.
The Guardian: Auntie’s digital revelation
M’colleague Tom Coates writes about blog aggregation. We had a quick chat about this at work the other day, and I think he’s bang on in the assertion that the next challenge will be one of aggregation, filtering, and pattern recognition across a multiplicity of blogs – but beyond Google and its smart but even-handed treatment of blogs as simply pages, towards something that takes into account the particular characteristics of blogs themselves.
Oh, and Tom’s right – he doesn’t look like that. Honest.
AFAIK, the Prelinger archives hasn’t needed the distribution network of P2P to reach its audiences. Just a very large server. Not as big as the BBC archives, perhaps, but certainly the biggest current public-domain film archive.