May 11, 2005, 6.27pm • 31 comments » • 1,960 Views

Open sesame, says BBC, giving content to the people

Two significant events today illustrate still further how the BBC is now opening up its rich content repositories for the online era.

First, BBC News went live with a relaxation of rules governing how people use its RSS feeds, announced last month. This means almost anyone with a website can now place BBC News headlines on their pages without legal ramifications, whereas previously people were only “allowed” to use the feeds for personal consumption in their own news aggregators. Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation asked: “Why do we need a license to aggregate, period?” Site editor Pete Clifton today answered that question: “It is only right we build in some safeguards so that if they appear on sites we feel are completely beyond the pale, we can act … we will keep an eye on where they are going.”

Today’s second development was the launch of backstage.bbc.co.uk:-

backstage.bbc.co.uk is the BBC’s new developer network, providing content feeds [, APIs and so on] for anyone to build with. Alternatively, share your ideas on new ways to use BBC content. This is your BBC. We want to help you play.

Backed by BBC News Interactive developer Ben Metcalfe, who already had several hacks to his name, the site is also a community and a showcase for how people are hacking BBC content. One hack, Wikiproxy, has been around for a while, but it was worth Stef Magdalisnki putting it up anyway.

Cory said: “They want the world to convert the BBC’s raw material into individualized, idiosyncratic and wildly imaginative applications. It’s the Flickrization of the Beeb and it’s so exciting I can scarce contain myself”.

Some of the ideas so far are fantastic. Uber developer Ben Hammersley says:-

That it fulfils a requirement of the BBC charter is wholly incidental. It’s actually a symbol of something much much bigger: it’s laying down the gauntlet for the rest of the world. It proves the point that on the internet, hiding your content is suicide.