Some of what I watched, all of it in fact, was pretty powerful stuff. Footage of British soldiers on the streets, saluting the coffin at a republican funeral. A Panorama filmed in a local hall with an audience of political moderates, ordinary well to do people, vehemently giving what for to the English presenter for his misrepresentation of their situation. The young Viscount MP from Fermanagh, who lived in a huge country estate, the moderniser, telling us of his family’s connections to the incumbents.

The footage itself was beautiful. Transferred from 16mm film, it had a wonderful quality to it. It was grainy, but the colour had a grading that made it look like a Hollywood movie. No doubt there will be many more of those with similar scenes. But this was real.

Twenty years later the MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone was Bobby Sands, the hunger striker. But what happened to the Establishment? What happened to each of the people who wanted peace and fairness for all, when things started to really get out of hand? At what point did things turn between the Army and those who originally welcomed them?

The answers to all these questions and many, many more are tied up in the BBC’s archive. A million hours of social history, most of it only seen once when it was recorded.

An edit suite is an incredibly creative environment. It encourages you to ask questions. To wonder what happened to someone in the crowd. It compels you to tell stories. But the realities of television and the commissioning process means most of those stories are never told.

But the web allows us to tell those stories. What we must concentrate on is building the tools that allow traditional programme makers to sit in an edit suite, be inspired, assemble their content and tell their story on the web. For that way, the stories get told.

Thank you to Frank, the editor I sat with this afternoon. These are his ideas and inspiration.

The BBC raised concerns around deep linking to iPlayer content and the use of the iPlayer trademark. The plugin was also playing content rights cleared for PC, but not set top box, usage. By making that content available on set top boxes, the plugin potentially exposed the BBC to issues with rights holders.

I understand the reasons I’ve been given and so have complied with this request.

BBC Internet Blog – What is PIPs?

Hopefully it will be the first of many.

I was given a very special gift on Thursday, a copy of Ash 1977. That on its own is enough to make me happy, but it wasn’t just any copy, this one is from the first 50,000 CD pressings and so has two hidden tracks (Jack Names The Planets and Don’t Know) in the pregap before track one.

Like most people these days I only listen to music on my computer, using iTunes, which can’t see the hidden tracks. Neither could my DVD player. I had started looking around for an old CD player, but then I found X Lossless Decoder.

X Lossless Decoder is, as the name suggests, a lossless audio decoder and CD ripper for Mac OS X, much like Exact Audio Copy on Windows. Crucially, it also supports reading audio information from the pregap. As you can see in the screenshot, it found the long pregap before track one without a problem.

It worked perfectly. I now have a set of bit perfect WAVs ready for conversion to AAC, importing into iTunes and putting on my iPhone. I am very happy indeed.

It’s not often I make a donation to an open source project, but I did this time. X Lossless Decoder has made my week. Well, X Lossless Decoder and the person who gave me the CD

Programmes would be ondemand, programme metadata would advertise and make the programme findable and then it would live a long and happy life, forever tied to that programme with a strong, persistent identifer.

Programmes wouldn’t disappear. The information about programmes wouldn’t disappear. In the world of /programmes, the world of today, the information about programmes doesn’t disappear. So why should the information about an archive programme have disappeared?

The fact a programme was broadcast fifty years ago doesn’t in and of itself make that programme special. The archive isn’t somehow different. Yes the BBC has been, and continues to be, of enormous social and cultural importance to the United Kingdom, but how do we surface the impact it has had? How do we show how important the BBC has been in shaping British culture?

Well, we’ve got to forget this idea of “the archive”. We’ve got to weave the history of the BBC, it’s programmes and their social impact into the very heart of bbc.co.uk. Archive content has got to lose it’s status as something special, something different. It’s got to hold it’s own against the content of today.

There’s no such thing as the archive, only time.

Northern Ireland is a fascinating place. A country of creationists and the place that only just started playing football on a Sunday, it’s also the place I’m proud to call home.

Four days in Northern Ireland – a set on Flickr

I just got this:

I Wanna Be Adored – The Stone Roses
Here Comes Your Man – Pixies
Supersonic – Oasis
This Charming Man – The Smiths
Molly’s Chambers – Kings Of Leon
I Predict A Riot – Kaiser Chiefs
Last Nite – The Strokes
You Do Something To Me – Paul Weller
A Design For Life – Manic Street Preachers
Ooh La – The Kooks
Big Sur – The Thrills
Waterfall – The Stone Roses
Morning Glory – Oasis
Lucky – Radiohead
Monkey Gone To Heaven – Pixies
There’s No Other Way – Blur
How Soon Is Now? – The Smiths
Black Swan – Thom Yorke
California Waiting – Kings of Leon
Someday – The Strokes
Cigarettes And Alcohol – Oasis
Oh My God – Kaiser Chiefs
Girl From Mars – Ash
I Am The Resurrection – The Stone Roses
Teenage Kicks – The Undertones

And that was just from the music on my iPhone…

Welcome to the Post Office® website – offering you a range of products from Post Office® Broadband, travel insurance and car insurance to life insurance and Instant Saver.

I’ve heard they do stamps too…

Ok, ok. They do mention that, but only right at the end.

I’m almost prepared to forgive them for trying to sell me life insurance before selling me postage just for the fact that they have an entire section of the site for people selling items on eBay.

Good move.