Category: Web Misc

The BBC ran a competition in April/May of this year called Reboot asking for submissions to redesign bbc.co.uk for the new web 2.0 world. I submitted a design on the last day of the competition, and quickly forgot about it… Until yesterday when I got an email informing me that I was one of the ten runners-up!

I’m pretty sure they weren’t too jazzed with my design (heck, I wasn’t), but they did seem to like some of my ideas, the judges said about my submission:

It was the 2 fascinating “social media” ideas here that swung it. The promos for Project: Planet Earth (“six billion volunteers required”). Eat that myspace! And the idea of a collaborative wiki based EastEnders script also stood out.

I’ve been told I win an iPod nano, which is cool, but I’m just excited that my ideas got recognised, it feels good! See my design in all its grainy-jpeg glory here, and of course check out the actual winning design here.

It was less then a month ago that Channel Nine was claiming to be the first in Australia to offer what they called “television downloads”, but were actually just PC-only one week rentals of McLeods Daughters, well not only were they not the first, they were about seven months off the mark.

And no, I’m not talking about my feeble attempts (here and here) to give away episodes of the Chaser. It turns out that the SBS show Speaking in Tongues was offering Mac and PC compatible downloads the day after broadcast from back in November last year.

I just can’t believe I never picked up on this, either way Speaking in Tongues is still on iTunes, and holding strong in the top 30 Australian podcasts.

Tim, who was involved in the Speaking in Tongues podcast also points out that the last episode of Thank God You’re Here is also available for download.

Most downloaded: Chris on Sunrise
Second place: BBC Radio 1 promo
Most comments: BBC News openers (34 and counting).
Bandwidth: 90.01 gigabytes
Total downloads: 36,781 videos

So I’ve shaved about 30px off the top of the logo to maximise space, and I’ve finally dumped ‘Rockwell’ as my font of choice, for now its ‘Gill Sans’ which aptly enough is the BBC and Saab font (..I drive a Saab).

It’ll probably change again soon, just got bored with the old one.

I’m back in Australia, the trip was awesome, I didn’t get to capture any international idents, Ireland was interesting, their RTE Two looks a lot like FOX8 (but green). Ireland and Bahrain both had Paramount comedy channels which I hadn’t seen before, and I got to watch BBC Prime in Manama (pictured) which was interesting (even if there wasn’t that much I really wanted to watch on it).