Wired on BBC

Cory is praising the BBC in the latest Wired.

"America's entertainment industry is committing slow, spectacular suicide, while one of Europe's biggest broadcasters -- the BBC -- is rushing headlong to the future, embracing innovation rather than fighting it.

Unlike Hollywood, the BBC is eager and willing to work with a burgeoning group of content providers whose interests are aligned with its own: its audience.

The BBC's news website is the first commercial news-gathering organization in the Western world to solicit and give prominence to photographs and reporting provided by its visitors...

Stef Magdalinski, a hacker-agitator-entrepreneur, responded with a guerrilla project called Wikiproxy, which rips all the news stories coming off the BBC news wire and mixes them by linking every proper noun to its corresponding Wikipedia entry. Of course, this burns to a crisp the old BBC policy against linking to external sites.

Rather than sue, the BBC created BBC Backstage, a service for remixing the Beeb that launched last week.

With Backstage, BBC's online department takes all the goop in its content-management system -- sports scores and TV listings, breaking news and editorials, conferences and weather -- and exposes it as a set of standard programming interfaces. Anyone who can hack a little Perl or Python can mix these into any kind of service they can imagine.

The crowning glory of the Beeb's openness is the Creative Archive. "