BBC Launches Democracy Live

The BBC has launched a new web site dedicated to live and on demand coverage of the UK’s national political institutions and the European parliament. Interesting to launch at a time when our faith in political institutions is being sorely tested. Who knows maybe such sites are a flag stone on the road to a greater interaction between voters and the institutions that claim to act on their behalf.

BBC Democracy Live

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• BBC launches Democracy Live with ’speech-to-text’ search (blogs.journalism.co.uk)

BBC iPlayer Going HD

The BBC iPlayer is tentatively preparing to offer high definition streams and downloads.It will be interesting to see how UK ISP’s react to the increased load HD material may  bring to their infrastructures as many of them already impose bandwidth throttling techniques for users who consumer too much data during certain time of the day.

An Internet bandwidth test will determine the best quality available to each iPlayer user.

HD material is expected  to later be added to Virgin media boxes , playstation 3 and Freesat at some time in the future.

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• UK.gov backs ISPs on charging content providers, throttling P2P (theregister.co.uk)
• HD shows surface on British iTunes Store, BBC on the way (macworld.com)
• Freesat now in 200,000 UK homes (guardian.co.uk)

OAuth Availablity Grows

Twitter can now manage 3rd party application access using OAuth

It’s been a while coming but there are a handful of applications out there using the OAuth protocol which allows secure authorization between web applications and services that use an API and allows those authorisations to be easily revoked if need be. This makes a lot of sense for social networking services such as Twitter where third party services have previously required you to enter your preious user-name and password in order to use their services and you had to hope and pray that these complimentary services were not just out to farm your account login details or at a future point might abuse these previously simple authorisation details. With Twitter which has introduced OAuth as an option for authentication a new connections tab now shows who you have authorised via the protocol.

I’m very careful who I hand out my Twitter login details to so OAuth adds a much needed layer of user centric security.
Hopefully OAuth will continue to grow as a  means of secure on-line API authentication.

Opera Turbo 10 Speeds Slow Web Browsing

Opera the web browser people are experimenting with a server side compression technology version of their browser which speeds up web browsing for Internet users with a slow Internet connection. Dial-up, 3G or throttled broadband web browsing speeds can be speeded up by compressing the data via a server doing just this. Traditionally this has been a paid for service that sits in between the computer and its Internet service provider as a third party paid for service (although AOL’s portal software used to compress on-line images a bit more many years ago when more of us had dial-up connections).

The Opera 10 Turbo preview can be downloaded by those who may find this technology of benefit. The compression ‘turbo’ mode can be toggled on and off easily.

Typically it’s pictures which account for a lot of the high data consumption of a web page (excluding streaming video and audio of course) and the effect of compressing what are usually compressed jpg’s anyway is noticeable as the following two examples show.The extra compressed picture via the turbo mode shown on the right shows more compression artifacts and this is the usual compromise that then enables web pages to load faster without having to turn off image loading altogether (which has always been possible in Opera).

Web Snob

You know that awful thing they say: “What’s so good about Sainsburys? It keeps the scum out of Waitrose”.

It’s that awful British snobbery.

In the same way, if someone’s email address is hotmail or AOL, you kind of think “Hmmn, I see, they’re not a real player, are they?”

I mean please don’t be offended if you’re thinking “How dare you – it’s a perfectly respectable address”, of course it’s a respectable address.

It’s ridiculous and, like all class things, absurd, but the web has it.

Stephen Fry highlighting how  snobbery continues onto the web (hotmail addresses-grits teeth.Must fight own inner prejudice. Smacked wrists all round).