Ben Metcalfe

Ultimate Geek Bling Prize

I’ve just posted the details for the first backstage.bbc.co.uk competition.

From the backstage.bbc.co.uk site:

For the first backstage.bbc.co.uk competition, we are offering you the opportunity to innovate and build prototypes that demonstrate new ways of exploring the BBC TV schedule. Plus we have arguably the ultimate “geek bling” prize for the producer of the winning prototype.

Some possible ideas you might like to incorporate include:

  • Combining schedules with web services such as del.lici.us, furl, flickr and technorati to open up each programme to external annotation.
  • Focusing on specific genres (contained within the TV Anytime metadata). Promotion of signed programmes, etc.
  • Introducing a social element to a schedule or channel (such as bookmarking programmes, rating/voting, vertical searches by genre).
  • Alerts, SMS, email broadcasts and other client-push delivery mechanisms.
  • Combine the schedule data in interesting ways with existing BBC feeds or non BBC information feeds (such as IMDB, Google images, Wikipedia, Google Video, Yahoo Video).
  • Explore new ways of users tagging the TV data and aligning that with tags attached to existing tag based web services

The winner will receive a brand new Dell rackmount server (I’m not allowed to tell you the brand of the server on the BBC website, but I don’t see why I can’t here!).

I think this is a wicked prize, even if I did choose it myself. I kind of wish I could enter it’s that good. 🙂

Two runners up will receive iPod Shuffles or some other 1Gig MP3 Player – not decided which ones yet (I hate iPods as people probably know, but I realise they are the “in” 1Gig player at the moment).