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To me this means two things:
1) The BBC is publishing its content as XML.
2) The BBC is explicitly giving repurposing rights to its content.
Both of these are fantastic precedents. In fact, I've written longish essays on both topics:
Greasemonkey: an Historical Perspective, explaining why widespread use of XML is essential to creating a truly user-centric web experience.
Open Source Lessons for Digital Media, which discusses what media companies can learn from the open source movement (namely that encouraging reuse of your content is a better approach than stifling it with copy protection).
That said, I believe that the BBC's impact will be more as a trendsetter than as a platform for new applications, per se. The ideas posted on the Backstage site seem to me to have more illustrative than practical value. The reason is that the main power of XML data feeds is that they can be so effectively aggregated. So feeds from just one premier news source only hint at the real value of this approach. Hopefully other leading news and entertainment sites will follow the BBC's lead, resulting in a whole ecosystem of top-quality XML content available for repurposing. That will lead to truly revolutionary new applications. |
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