Share, Find and Play. The world moves apace...

The BBC today unveiled radical plans to rebuild its website around user-generated content, including blogs and home videos, with the aim of creating a public service version of MySpace.com.

Ashley Highfield, the BBC director of new media and technology, also announced proposals to put the corporation's entire programme catalogue online for the first time from tomorrow in written archive form, as an "experimental prototype", and rebrand MyBBCPlayer as BBC iPlayer.

[...]

Mr Highfield's presentation, Beyond Broadcast, outlined a three-pronged approach to refocus all future BBC digital output and services around three concepts - "share", "find" and "play".

He said the philosophy of "share" would be at the heart of what he dubbed bbc.co.uk 2.0.

Mr Highfield said the share concept would allow users to "create your own space and to build bbc.co.uk around you", encouraging them to launch ther own blogs and post home videos on the site.

The BBC is also running a competition to revamp the bbc.co.uk 2.0 website, asking the public to redesign the homepage to "exploit the fuctionality and usability of services such as Flickr, YouTube, Technorati and Wikipedia".

Link: MediaGuardian.co.uk.

Our time is done...

According to the British Library, academics in India and China will soon be generating the big ideas in science, technology and economics...

China and India - already braced to become two of the world's greatest economic powers - are now expected to become two of its most important academic powerhouses.

The British Library - renowned for collecting books, journals and artefacts from across the globe - is set to shift its focus from Western Europe towards China and India, to ensure Britons have access to the most important research.

Staff will outline the new strategy on Tuesday along with their predictions that the two countries could overtake the West as intellectual and cultural hotspots.

The library's greatest treasures are currently kept in the elegant exhibition room on the first floor: Jane Austen's desk, Mozart's scores, Shakespeare's first folio and Einstein's calculations.

Such glories marking Western thought from the past are set to be joined by work from the greatest thinkers of the 21st century - and, says the library, they are likely to come from the East.

Link: Guardian Unlimited Books.

The Observer reports that University is becoming ever more expensive, and that China is beginning to muscle in...

Graduates will have to work well into their thirties before they can reap the financial benefits of getting a degree, according to new research that will make many parents and teenagers question the value of university.

The spiralling costs of university education in England and Wales mean that it is only when graduates with a three-year degree turn 33 - after 12 years of full-time work - that their earnings overtake those of someone who began work at 18.

Five years ago, graduates reached that break-even point at 28.

This dramatic change is likely to make more and more A-level students ask about alternatives to university, said the author of the research, Peter Brown, director of Gabbitas Educational Consultants.

[...]

The research was issued as the Director of Admissions at Cambridge University admitted that students from abroad were turning down places there to go to less prestigious US universities with larger support packages.

Geoff Parks said: 'The market has become more and more competitive and an increasing number of those we make offers to outside the EU decline them.

We are losing some to the US universities, but now we are seeing Chinese universities [are also] more financially attractive.'

Link: The Observer | UK News | The true cost of a college education.

Technorati recently announced that they are now tracking more than 35m blogs around the world - and that number is doubling every 6 months. Now the Guardian adds weight to that story.

Bloggers and internet pundits are exerting a "disproportionately large influence" on society, according to a report by a technology research company. Its study suggests that although "active" web users make up only a small proportion of Europe's online population, they are increasingly dominating public conversations and creating business trends.

[...]

"We're seeing this growing," said Julian Smith, an online advertising analyst with Jupiter Research and author of the report. "The strongest part of their influence is on the media: if something online suddenly becomes a story in the local press, then it matters."

Although unprompted contributors are generally younger and more vocal than the wider online population, they are increasingly important as opinion formers and trend-setters. Mr Smith says businesses, media organisations and advertisers reading blogs should be wary of making assumptions about their wider significance, but that their muscle cannot be ignored.

"They're not representative of the larger audience, but what they're saying does matter," he said. "It's a good straw poll - a snapshot of the verbal conversations going on that we can't measure."

Yuri's Night

From the website:

Human Spaceflight became a reality 45 years ago with the launch of a bell-shaped capsule called “Vostok 1.” The capsule was carrying Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who took his place in history as the first human to leave the bounds of Earth and enter outer space.

Exactly 20 years later, the United States embarked on a new era in spaceflight with the inaugural launch of a new type of spaceship -- the Space Shuttle. Designed to carry a larger crew and large volumes of cargo to orbit, the Space Shuttles became synonymous with human spaceflight for an entirely new generation of young people.

When the next 20-year point arrived, that generation (often called “Gen X”) laid a new space milestone by connecting thousands of people around the world to celebrate and honor the past, while building a stairway to the future. That event was Yuri’s Night, and it continues to bring the excitement, passion and promise of space travel closer to people of all ages, nationalities and backgrounds.

Stanford on iTunes is by far the most thought-provoking concept I've seen in a while.

They are using the iTunes browser to offer up lectures and supporting material.

Factor in that iTunes handles audio, video and text (.pdf).

And now connect to iPod.

Obvious really.

Of course, once you start considering what Apple might do with their next generation iPod...

Steve Jobs gave an address at Stanford last summer. There's a nice line in there that goes as follows:

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., April 1, 2006 - Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG)

Google's latest product is Google Romance.

The service promises to offer psychographic matchmaking and all-expenses-paid dates for couples who agree to experience contextually relevant advertising throughout the course of their evening.

"Our mission, as you might have heard, is to organize the world's information," said Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's senior vice president, product management. "And let's face it: in what area of life is the world's information more disorganized than romance? We thought we could use our search technology to help you find that special someone, then send you on a date and use contextual ads to help you, ya know - close the deal."

The product, a beta release currently residing on Google Labs, can be experimented with at www.google.com/romance.

You begin by uploading your Profile. If you are the sort of person who uploads more than one profile then you might find it useful to employ the Batch Profile Uploading option.

You then do a Soulmate Search, in which your deeply personal and potentially life-altering search results are produced solely by computer algorithm, without human intervention of any kind.

Depending on your personality, you may or may not find this reassuring.

"Our internal projections say Contextual Dating is going to be unbelievably huge, just a total cash cow," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt in prepared remarks placed into the notes section of an executive PowerPoint presentation and intended solely for internal use but promptly leaked onto the web and then roundly mocked on Digg and Slashdot.