Lets get this nonsense started
This is going to be something of a confession post. I’ve been dieting, watching my weight, exercising more and every other excuse for not actually sorting my health out for years.
I’m about 5’ 7” and currently weight (however much I try to blame it on the scales) about 16 stone with a stomach that reaches the door about a week before I do.
The problem is that I like food, actually no I’ll go one step further than that – I love food.
Actually I can’t say ‘love’ food in the context I’m talking about – yes I do LOVE food in the taste, texture and artistic concept but in this context a better word would be obsessed with food.
I’m a geek and work in an industry that involves long periods of time sitting in front of a computer screen at my desk.
Working at a desk all day means I regularly pick at food all day and in most cases this is utterly crap food – not the sort of food anyone could love – more food that you just kind of eat.
Crisps, fizzy drinks, cakes, pot noodles etc….
There has only been two times in my life I’ve successfully lost wait and kept it off for more than a day or two.
The first was when I was sixteen and was working every evening/night while going to school during the day – this meant I had something like 30 minutes a day to grab something to eat while constantly on my feet the rest of the time.
The second time was about five years ago when I decided, for fun, to keep a diary of everything I eat and did over the course of a month on bbc.co.uk/jersey.
The shame of spending the first week or so writing about all the crap I was eating shamed me into making my diet healthier. This proved successful and I got myself down to a reasonable weight.
But I stopped writing the diary before any real habit was able to form – so the weight went back on pretty quickly.
As I don’t want to change my job I’ve decided to give the diary thing another go – after all I have a blog that demands huge amounts of content to stay active.
This is the introduction post.
Hello, my name is Ryan and I’m an over eater! I’m currently just under 16 stone and need to get down to at most 11 stone.
Mapping down to your house
An idea was posted on the BBC Backstage Idea Store asking whether it was possible to search for stories that happened around the posters house – basically to get as local as possible.
It was posted by and basically said:
Sometimes I would like to find news that is happening in a certain area. This area might be quite small and I might be less interested in how recent the news is.
I may for example want to find all news that happened near my house in the last year.
The original author suggested a few solutions to the problem – these including providing a location based search, making sure location data is available within the news feeds and metadata and creating an algorithm to search through the content on pages to look for place names and adding location data where necessary.
- Image via Wikipedia
But there may be a solution in the offering from the BBC in the not to distant future – and it will come in the form of an enhance (albeit original video free) BBC Local.
As BBC Local moves into the News & Sport CPS and towards the new look service I think you’ll be able to do something along these lines from within your BBC Local site.
Mapping will probably play a fairly big part of these sites as they develop (without original video) over the next year or two.
Expect to see an interactive map of the region the site covers (so for example Bristol) with wide reaching stories created by the Bristol team (as well as TV/radio teams for the area).
Then as you zoom further in you’ll be able to see more locally relevant stories – eventually down as far as your own street – although I doubt they’ll be many at that level from the BBC.
Obviously I don’t know for certain this is what will happen – it is what I’d like to see happen but I’m also not convinced BBC Local content gets local enough to make it worthwhile.
I mean its ok for Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man – local is island wide here and there – but for someone like BBC Three Counties – local is an interesting issue.
- Image via Wikipedia
Ideally local would go down to the street level – in fact it would go down to house level – but life isn’t ideal and the BBC Local content is a long way from being THAT local.
You might get the odd story you can tie to the odd street – but if you looked at a full detailed map of Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire – the number of pins would still be pretty sparse – even after nearly a decade of being am active site.
Maybe if a partnership agreement could be struck between the BBC and local newspapers you’d get the level of localness you’re looking for.
The BBC has the big regional stuff, local newspapers cover a town and then if you pulled in parish newsletters (giving them a blog or a way of publishing online and encouraged residents associations to blog as well – you could create a fully detailed map with a mass of truly local content.
Related articles by Zemanta
- BBC’s local news plans ‘threaten regional newspapers’
- 2009 a make or break year for UK media
- Interesting Stuff 2008-11-24
- BBC to undertake review of Worldwide service
- Roy Greenslade: Memo to Society of Editors – redefine journalism
- Making Money with Articles: Learn to Use Search Engine Optimization Techniques
- How To Make 2009 Your Best Blogging Year
- How To – Move From WordPress.com To WordPress.org
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=14d2541d-b69e-4019-8ca7-a2c1659c3e8f)
And a great big Doh!
I wrote, in very rushed and excited tones a couple of weeks ago that the wonderfulness that is Top Gear would be returning to our screens in June 15 – looks like I was wrong. Read more
Playing with my Pipes
When Yahoo launched Pipes about a year ago I spent a LOT of time playing with it, in fact you could say I got a little bit addicted – but I managed to break the addiction and leave it alone.
Embedding madness
I love the fact that I can now go to a BBC News story and watch the video file right there on the page without having to wait for a pointless painful pop-up.
More from the BBC
When the BBC started re-launching its sites into the new design language (with the big black bar at the top of the page) there were a LOT of complaints.
Five years of this
I know I’ve been blogging for a long time but not always on this URL – so finding the exact date I started blogging has been tough – so far I’ve only been able to trace back about three years – well now I can go further.
Embedded video on BBC News
It’s been a long time coming but it looks like BBC News Online has finally launched embedded videos. By embedded videos I’m actually talking about inline flash movies as part of a page.
Notable comment
From the Times story on the baptism of a mulsim in Rome.
I’ll let you in to a little secret – I prefer to read comments and the responses to comments on news articles than the articles themselves most of the time.
Read more