Category Archives: Thinking Out Loud

On serendipity

Posted on February 4, 2025 by

One of our more recent NoTube demos was inspired by an XKCD cartoon which prompted us to ask: can we make a large video collection interesting enough so that people keep browsing rather than give up? As we’ve said before, … Continue reading →

Posted in Demos, Linked Data, Recommendations, Thinking Out Loud, User Experience | 5 Comments

Take the user perspective, and talk about what we learn

Posted on October 8, 2024 by

At IBC people kept asking: what’s your product? Now we don’t have a NoTube product - nor should we have - this is a pre-market project - but the common follow-up question ‘what is your goal’ is a very reasonable … Continue reading →

Posted in Thinking Out Loud | 2 Comments

Using cartoon-strip style sketches to convey our ideas in NoTube

Posted on September 24, 2024 by

The BBC’s role in NoTube is as one of three ‘Use Case’ partners - we come up with ideas and prototypes which drive the technology choices and services created in the other parts of the project. The theme of the … Continue reading →

Posted in Demos, Thinking Out Loud | 1 Comment

The future will be watching not reading

Posted on July 8, 2024 by

Following our EU project review in May, the most recent NoTube project meeting last month was a good time to reflect a little on what we’ve done so far and what we should do next, especially given the speed with … Continue reading →

Posted in Thinking Out Loud, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

How can we best measure how good people think our recommendations are?

Posted on May 13, 2024 by

Recently a friend was describing how her friend had persuaded her to watch a DVD that she thought she’d absolutely hate, but ended up loving. The DVD was the 2004 BBC TV series ‘Blackpool’ (described as “part musical, part thriller, … Continue reading →

Posted in Recommendations, Thinking Out Loud | 3 Comments

Designing a touch-screen TV remote control on a smartphone

Posted on May 5, 2024 by

Our first demo for “Internet TV in the Social Web” includes an iPhone app that works as both a TV remote control and a ‘companion device’ for viewing programme recommendations and programme guides, managing programme playlists, and reading background information … Continue reading →

Posted in Second screens, Thinking Out Loud, User Experience | 5 Comments

Brokering EPG & enrichment services

Posted on April 22, 2024 by

Libby’s post already mentioned some of the current activities in NoTube related to EPG metadata, particularly EPG harvesting, enrichment and filtering. While the Semantic Web Services (SWS) broker, one of the central components in NoTube, aims at brokering distributed services, … Continue reading →

Posted in Demos, Thinking Out Loud | Leave a comment

In praise of swimlane diagrams

Posted on January 20, 2025 by

As an Information Architect (IA) I often make diagrams of various kinds - usually user flow diagrams, sitemaps and wireframes. However, I’d never made use of swimlane diagrams until the most recent NoTube project meeting. Commonly used for diagramming business … Continue reading →

Posted in Meetings, Thinking Out Loud | 1 Comment

Writing scripts for teasing out requirements

Posted on January 15, 2025 by

The Problem We were looking for ways to bring out the full implications of our ideas for scenarios to check that they were implementable and work out how we would implement them. This is a very common problem, and we … Continue reading →

Posted in Meetings, Thinking Out Loud | 1 Comment

Would you like to know more? [*]

Posted on December 1, 2024 by

I’m a representative of the BBC as one of the ‘Usecase’ partners in NoTube, and it’s my responsibility to draft a document describing one of the prototypes we want to make, combining components created by all the workpackages. We will … Continue reading →

Posted in Thinking Out Loud | Tagged | 2 Comments