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Jun
10

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Please reply in English next time

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Earlier this year I must have e-mailed the Department for Culture, Media and Sport – or at least filled out a form, petition or wrote something somewhere.

What I sent was obviously something to do with children’s television and the state of it in the UK – or at least the lack of homegrown children’s tv outside of the BBC.

Below is the response I just received – although it doesn’t really give me any clue to what I may, or may not have asked them in the original e-mail/form/petition…

See if you can make any sense of it – but from now on – please reply in English! Or if you can’t manage full on plain English – how about something that’s at least understandable to non-political normal human beings.

Thank you for your e-mail of May 2009 regarding the level of output for Children’s television programmes.

In our interim report, published on 29 January, we identified children’s content for all ages, but especially for the over 10s, as one of the priorities to be addressed by the new framework for public service content that is being designed. This would include content both transmitted on television and on new media platforms.

This approach was supported by the evidence set out in Ofcom’s statement on public service broadcasting, “Putting Viewers First”, published on 21 January, which reaffirmed their view, first set out in 2007 in their report into the children’s TV sector, that there was a market failure, especially for older teenagers and young adults, which would need to be addressed.

We recognise that this is a key area of concern for both parliamentarians and stakeholder and we will be outlining our proposed approach to this problem in the final Digital Britain report, which is due to be published shortly.

I hope this information helps

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Jan
6

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Inspiration into flattery?

Category: Web Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

The BBC has long been the beacon of inspiration for many a person in all aspects of the creative industry.

This NeXT workstation (a NeXTcube) was used by...
Image via Wikipedia

The BBC introduces a genre of programming and other TV networks take that genre on in their own way.

The BBC introduces a style of web interface and very quickly other sites start to introduce elements of that design style and language.

In some cases they just copy all the elements outright (from Your Site is Valid).

Then again some take the basic concept for what it is (a great example of user interface and interactivity design) and does it in their own way.

And then again still – some copy a bit of both – the elements themselves, the design style AND the navigation, interaction structure.

The latest site I’ve noticed doing just that came to me in the form of a television channel recommendation from my father in law.

Its an Iranian English language news channel called Press TV and its web presence bears a remarkable resemblance to the BBC news site.

presstv

You can see it at http://presstv.ir

The left hand navigation is the most obvious – the gray bar with red line at the end to show the area you’re on, then when you move to a section with sub-indexes it drops down in exactly the same way the one on news.bbc.co.uk does.

The actual index area is almost identical to the generic BBC news online index and the story page is layed out almost identically as well.

bbcnews

bbcnews_old

In fact the even the social bookmarking links are more or less the same as on BBC News.

BBC News in August 2005 (includes BBCi navbar)
Image via Wikipedia

Now the site isn’t identical in every way – the right hand navigation is very different, the top and bottom layouts are very different and not every index uses that style.

But the basic structure is close enough to the BBC site than can be put aside as pure coincidence.

However, this is where some would get all indignant and cry foul play – personally I think its a good thing.

There are so many sites online with piss poor user interface design that when something clearly works – I think it should be embraced and used across the board.

OK so PressTV.ir uses a similar colour scheme and layout – but if they can’t take it from a public service broadcaster who can they – share and share alike and in turn make the world wide web a less confusing place.

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