On 13th March 2007 David and Iain of the Spoken Word joined David Jordan from the BBC’s ‘Future Media and Technology’ department at the JISC Conference 2007 in Birmingham.

The JISC conference provided an excellent opportunity to showcase the Spoken Word’s work alongside the other projects involved in the digital libraries in the classroom programme including DialogPlus (University of Southampton and Penn State University), DART (London School of Economics) and DIDET (University of Strathclyde and Stanford University).

All those inviolved in the digital libraries in the classroom programme shared a stand, answered questions and handed out leaflets to others present at the conference.

The conference also provided the backdrop for a 15 minute JISC funded film promoting the work of the digital libraries in the classroom programmes that includes David and Iain of Spoken Word, Alan Hutton, Douglas Chalmers, various Caledonian University students and the Saltire Centre…by popular demand the film will appear on the Spoken Word site shortly!

The conference was also useful for meeting with people that the project had previously collaborated with. Notably David met with Chris Awre from the University of Hull who, like ourselves, is currently part of the Fedora users group. Recently we have started a new collaboration with the University of Hull in the form of the JISC REMAP project.

However the most notable meeting took place with Tom Loosemore who is project director of BBC 2.0 at JISC. He has played a key role in the BBC’s New Media strategy over the past few years and so the meeting was of great interest. The meeting took place after Tom had presented to the conference about the 15 web development principles that the BBC are currently using as a structure to develop their web services and reach out to even more users. A brief outline of his presentation can be found by clicking here. In the coming months we hope to visit the BBC to talk to staff in the Future Media and Technology department and carry out a presentation about the work of the Spoken Word project.

Photo Courtesy of: ClickCLickElectric

David Donald has been invited to share his expertise with Northwestern graduate students at the Medill School of Journalism, Sciences Po in Paris.

Sciences Po is an undergraduate and graduate education doctoral school and research centre in Paris with a library and documentation and publishing services.

David will talk with the students about various new media issues including blogging, audio, video, and interactive web applications for journalism. He will concentrate on teaching students how to use blog applications for the first time and outline the digital audio and video work done on the Spoken Word project which will be extremely useful for journalists interested in furthering their knowledge of web based broadcasting.

Photo(c): Courtesy of ‘That Ambitious Girl’

Well, Joost is a new project which used to be known as the Venice Project. The Venice Project was a codename for an online television system, now it’s called Joost

It’s co-founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis co-founded Skype, the internet telephony service that has taken the telecommunications world by storm. Joost is billed as “a new way to watch TV, free of the schedules and restrictions that come with traditional television. Combining the best of TV with the best of the internet.” However, it is not just another YouTube nor a rival for dozens of other ways to share short video clips. The ambition is provide a full-screen television service where users can do things like change channels - a streaming service, rather than a file download service. This needs a lot of bandwidth. Even with digital compression, it could easily consume a gigabyte per hour.

Content is, naturally, thin at the start of the beta service. The intention is that Joost will offer programmes from the leading TV networks, with deals yet to be announced, and with digital rights management (DRM) where required. There will also be paid adverts. Users will be able to create their own TV channels and upload their own programmes, as well as using the net to chat among themselves.

And Joost will cross national boundaries. The company operates from Luxembourg - the centre of the European TV industry - and already has offices in five countries. That should amuse the TV regulation bodies.

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