DJALCHEMI

BBC geek archive (sort of)

One news service to which I subscribe described the backstage.bbc.co.uk beta as "the talked-about BBC content archive", which confuses it with the pilot of the Creative Archive, which it isn't. But it's easy to see how this confusion arises. The backstage site headline (at the time of writing) is "Build what you want using BBC content", which is pretty close to one of the stated purposes of the Creative Archive.

backstage.bbc.co.uk is targeted more at techies than at 'creative media' producers — a distinction that is becoming increasingly blurred. The content that it offers is not programmes but a collection of RSS feeds and APIs (RSS definition, API definition). A software development kit is also promised in the near future. This content and data isn't licensed under the Creative Archive Licence but under some terms of use that have a remarkably similar gist to the CA Licence.

Here are the steps for using backstage.bbc.co.uk. The project description describes backstage.bbc.co.uk as a response to the Graf Review of BBC Online, and confesses "In the past the BBC has not always encouraged such 'amateur innovators'" [read: 'geeks'].

There's no news item about backstage.bbc.co.uk on the Creative Archive Licence Group site, and no link in the opposite direction either. Again there's a whiff of inter-organisational politics and 'ownership' in the distinctly separate presentation of these closely-related sibling projects.