I think they shot a very creative video which is inline with the purpose of their existence. I can’t imagine any Turkish government department shooting such a promotional video even if they were working on new media. I think this is way cool for a government organization.

What makes this tour an experiment is that in addition to this traditional reporting, Hammersley will also be posting news to his blog, pictures to Flickr, videos to YouTube and he will be microblogging on Twitter. Moreover, he will be sharing his bookmarks on del.icio.us and networking on Facebook.

I find this news very interesting and noteworthy not only because this is going to take place in Turkey during the general elections but also because this is a great demonstration of how traditional media can embrace the external tools of the web.

Richard Sambrook, director of BBC Global News, says:

This is an experiment to look at how a series of international reports can be spread through social media sites and hopefully reach new audiences.
…
The interesting thing that we?re doing is that the majority of the content that we?re going to be producing online is going to be hosted externally on different external sites. We?re using services which are already very popular. ?By using external tools we?re able to do very interesting things very quickly without resorting to any enormously long development time. It?s about being part of the web, rather than on the web.

I think the above quote coming from a traditional media director is very insightful and very true. This shows that BBC is understanding the value of external tools and really embracing their 15 web principles. As the Press Gazette article points at, this experiment is very much guided by the 5th principle: ?Treat the entire web as a creative canvas: don?t restrict your creativity to your own site.?

I will definitely follow Hammersley in his journey and will be following his reports and look forward to socialize with him on Facebook. If you are interested here is how you can follow this social media experiment:

Ben Hammersley’s blog
Ben Hammersley’s Twitter
Ben Hammersley’s Flickr Photo Stream
Ben Hammersley’s del.ico.us bookmarks
Ben Hammersley’s YouTube videos

bbc, social media, ben hammersley, turkey elections

One of the main problems with podcasts is not being able to search inside a podcast just like text based web content.

Pluggd seems to have the solution for that and it seems very promising from their demo. They are using speech processing and semantics to pinpoint the sections of the audio that contain the search term. It is called Hear Here!

I immediately signed up for the service to try it out. However, from what I understand only ESPN Sportscenter podcasts are search enabled at the moment. Their blog says the feature will be available site wide soon.

There is a demo available that shows how the technology performs on the ESPN podcast.

Today there was an article about Pluggd in Wired . Wired says that Pluggd is Google for Podcasts. There was also Techcrunch’s coverage of Pluggd here. I guess it will remain to be seen if this will be the case. However, if the technology works, it will potentially be a big hit.

For one, it would be awesome to search inside music podcasts for example. You would type in an artist or song name and all the podcasts that featured them would be listed.

I will be waiting for them to make the functionality globally available on their site.

Technorati Tags: pluggd, podcast search

[tags]podcast, audio search technology, pluggd[/tags]

I am a bit late reporting this news but CNN Turk (joint venture between CNN International and Dogan Media Group of Turkey) started podcasting and videocasting more than 30 original programs. This move marks the most mainstream podcasting adaptation to take place in Turkey.

Feeds for the podcasts and vidcasts can be found here. Podcasts are all in Turkish. I have subscribed to the video podcasts and watched a couple programs. Some programs are not broadcasted in their entirity rather some parts are included in the video feed. CNN Turk even vidcasts weather forecasts.
[tags]turkey, podcast, vidcast[/tags]

Technorati Tags: cnn turk, cnn, podcast, vidcast