Remixed BBC

[andrewducker]

This site takes the BBC News website and automatically adds links to Wikipedia and Technorati into the articles.

Hideously illegal from a copyright point of view, but a fascinating example of what can be done quite simply to make web pages altogether more useful.

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Very cool. If all newspapers and media-sites do not look like this in 5 years then the people in charge of the media are very much not doing their jobs, which is admittedly usually true in the US.

[whumpdotcom.livejournal.com]

How would this be different if I was remixing the BBC page in my browser using JavaScript and asynch requests?

[odheirre.livejournal.com]

I think this page hits the differences (with the exception that Smart Tags were added automatically, which navigating to whitelabel.org at least implies the reader knows text is being altered).

The big issue in my mind is you can't tell what is "BBC quoted" text and what is text inserted by Whitelabel (and everything, including links, is really just text). If the tags could be easily turned on or off (which would be very doable with JavaScript), I think it would negate a lot of the issues.

[andrewducker]

I have no idea how you'd do that...

[themongkey.livejournal.com]

This is exactly what Microsoft tried to do with Smart Tags (TM) - ISTR that everyone was up in arms about it then.

[andrewducker]

Yup - I had an argument with Dave Winer at the time - I said that people should be able to (a) edit text on their own computer and (b)automate that process.

He said that people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between what he said and what Microsoft said and that was bad.

[trashcanglam.livejournal.com]

[Current Music | U2 - Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Hor]

I've ridden many wild whores in my time, but I don't ever recall seeing U2 in those establishments. Perhaps they like the 'classy ladies'.