BBC Backstage Widgets competition awards night Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Last night I went along to the presentation of the awards for the BBC Backstage widgets competition. This, I hasten to add, was not a big London hotel glitzy affair (how many years will that take?) but was held in the private room of a big City pub in London.

BBC Backstage is relatively new within the BBC and you can read about them here . As a consequence, they are not too well known either internally or externally and sadly the competition therefore received little publicity. Only 10 entries were submitted, which I was surprised by, particularly given the excellent prizes offered.

Anyway, the submission that were made sounded great, with the winning entry. "My Music" enabling you to name your favourite bands and then rather like earFeeder, will notify you ala RSS whenever those bands are mentioned on the BBC with links to the content. Doesn't work for say whenever the tracks from the artist is played, but would spot them being featured in programmes or in articles.

Other widgets captured traffic info and the one I most liked and sure endless possibilities for was one that geomapping news articles. So you navigated (google earth like) round a globe between the news stories - my extensions to this were news heatmaps. In fact much of the evening was turned over to chatting about ideas for widgets.

I also got to meet Jay, one of the co-founders of Snipperoo , who are staking their claim in the widget space, with a widget manufacturing platform [sounded a bit like a ning for widgets which I hadn't detected when I'd originally checked out their website - I had just thought they were a widget directory listing/aggregator through which you built your personal "bling" inventory]

Fun night, shame more people didn't entered but then there's always next year.

posted by John Wilson @ 9:03 AM Permanent Link newsvine reddit



2 Comments:

At 3:42 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi John,

Good to meet you last night.

Just a quick clarification; the winning entry was "Radio Live 'n' Bynet", "My Favourite Bands" actually came third.

Ian's put an entry about the winners up on the Backstage blog.

As an aside, do you know that all your external links in that post seem to be prefixed with "http://www.writetomyblog.com/"

 
At 3:42 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi John,

Good to meet you last night.

Just a quick clarification; the winning entry was "Radio Live 'n' Bynet", "My Favourite Bands" actually came third.

Ian's put an entry about the winners up on the Backstage blog.

As an aside, do you know that all your external links in that post seem to be prefixed with "http://www.writetomyblog.com/"

 

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