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Everyone enjoyed themselves at the BBC Backstage Networking Bashes. Its the first time we'd ventured out of London and setup a bash in Manchester. And the turn out for both were good. In total across both events we hit about 370 people which is great news. As backstage would not work without the people who engage with us and the BBC through such events.
So we decided to get some of these people on camera for the rest of the world to see. I mainly asked them the same question, what do they think would be the one thing to look out for next year. And the answers were very varied.
Dom the hodge on the near future
Tim Page on No 2 ID and the near future
Tim from Free Software Manchester on the near future
Chris on the near future
Dan from Adaptivist on the near future
Lucy on the near future
Olie on the near future
Steven on the near future
Nile on the near future
Carly on the near future
Josh on the near future
Steven on the near future
Dave Mee on the near future
Whoyang on the near future
In addition, we also have some fun clips,
The Santa Claus Invasion
Jag's orders a weird drink
Wii Mario Kart in retro low def
Light fun with Amanda and Ajaz
< Previous | News |
This IM bot comes from a BBC member of staff Duncan Robertson...
I have been playing with ejabberd, Jabber, XMPP and the various client libraries, specifically the rather wonderfully simple Jabber::Simple and Jabber:Bot.It all started because I was doing a Fireeagle integration job with a product at work, and was getting frustrated with the fact that it is still not super simple to update my location. It struck me as I stared at my desktop, that I always have Adium running. Wouldn’t it be great if I had a Fireeagle contact that I could just tell my location, and it would go off and update, letting me know when they’re done. Now that part is midway done (post to come), but before I started that, I wanted to research more the workings of a Chatterbot, a computer program that pretends to be a human and can answer basic commands. They have been around for a long time, I remember playing with an IRC bot a while back, getting it to display the last commit messages from Subversion.
So that research turned into a BBC Programmes bot. As I worked on BBC Programmes, I have good knowledge of the site and the data within, and building a bot that integrated with that data seemed a good example of using the restful API available.
If you just want to try this thing out, here are the details of what you need to do.
- You need a Gmail or Jabber compatible IM account
- You need a Jabber enabled client, I’ve listed a few:
- You need to add a new contact: im.bbcprogrammes@gmail.com
This should be it. You should have a new contact appear in your list (They have a BBC logo as an avatar). You can now begin a conversation with this contact. It’s probably best to start with: HELP
Off-site link to prototype: http://whomwah.com/2008/11/02/bbc-programmes-via-instant-messenger/
< Previous | Prototypes |
From the Mailing list,
Personally I'm waiting for the time when we can pause a program and scroll over the items on-screen and it'll tell us what they are and where we can buy them, like when Ed Norton describes his apartment at the beginning of Fight Club.
< Previous | Ideas |
