We set up the latest version of Drupal with the IdeaTorrent module. Paola themed it to match a BBC microsite. She also updated the module to simplify the functionality.

TweetStore

Frank Wales

2009

Frank Wales created TweetStore, a Twitter archive for BBC R&D. It is perl software which robustly fetches and archives hundreds of BBC-related twitter accounts into an eXistDB XML database.

RSSCatcher

Frank Wales

2008

Frank developed software to archive the BBC's RSS feeds in an XML database, with a web front-end; designed to be portable, robust and scalable to thousands of feeds.

Tell Me When ~ BBC Innovation Lab

Paola Kathuria & Frank Wales

2007

For the second year running, we were one of ten companies short-listed from hundreds to attend the week-long BBC Innovation Lab for new media ideas.

With the help of mentors and experts, we worked on our idea throughout the week. We pitched at the end of the week of BBC Commissioners. Our idea was one of the few chosen to take forward.

Tell Me When is a service which notifies people on what to read, see, do or visit based on their interests.

Our week's experience was featured by Kathyrn Corrick for NMK in the article [off-site] BBC Innovation Labs: Take Two.

We later worked with the BBC to gather ideas in a facilitated brain-storming day. We documented the results, defined the page types. We finally wireframed the system with the help of Francois Jordaan.

BBC Innovation Lab

Frank Wales & Paola Kathuria

2006

We were one of ten companies short-listed from hundreds to attend the week-long BBC Innovation Lab for new media ideas.

With the help of mentors and experts, we worked on our idea throughout the week. We pitched at the end of the week of BBC Commissioners. Our idea was one of the few chosen to take forward.

This is from our original labs entry form.

BBC Keywords:

Create and distribute the tools necessary to let anyone add BBC-maintained tags to their online services, as a complement to existing user-generated tags.The BBC has internal taxonomies, and library information specialists able to maintain organized tag sets. We propose turning this knowledge outwards, to enable a greater level of reliable connections and searches amongst user-tagged objects without diminishing the value of user-generated tags.

If people can easily mix well-defined tags with their own idiosyncratic ones, it will provide both individual value and the ability for the BBC and others to make meaningful connections between tagged resources.

The BBC said of our idea:

Many of the projects we recieved for the Innovation Labs looked at tagging, but the few that we picked for the Labs added a partiular feature or idea that made them stand out. In the case of BBC keywords, the idea was mixing the BBC's existing formal metadata with user tags, creating a richer resource of metadata to help users find and share content.