Location, Location, Location... A packed day of speakers at where2008 leads me to think that the fact I work for somewhere that doesn't have to make money is a bit of a godsend, especially in the realms of webspace. Some awseome demonstrations of technologies show just how empowered the global web community are - with one key problem, how do we "monetize" them?
Obviously this isn't just exclusive to online mapping - there's a hell of a lot of stuff that has the same problem. Get an idea, build a beta, get popular then...... erm, whatdyado? Apart from selling yourself to one of the Big Three, you're at a bit of a loss for a lot of the time. The audience have had "free" lavished on them for the last 10 years - thats not going to go away.
So the BBC should maybe step in. Got an idea? Not profitable but still going to draw in the punters? Come to Auntie. We should be aiding development of these things, nurturing them and making the transition to university lab or bedroom up to a widely used reality. Surely if all those years ago we bought h2g2 (which IMO turned it into a slightly-more-than-useless set of web pages with a BBC logo on them) then we could turn our occasional funds to something more relevant and community (both the UK population and the web) worthy.
Am I just mad?
Perhaps something to try out to prove whether I am would be to build my own drone. :o)
1 comment:
You're mad.
Though seriously look at what Channel4 have now with their 4IP fund, £50 million to invest in public service new media ideas. Where is the BBC in all of this.
Like you say we bought H2G2 and completely failed to do anything with it. In meetings I have heard people say 'you know you could imagine a situation where a few years ago it would have been the BBC that created wikipedia'. Completely forgetting that they had that opportunity and squandered it.
We (BBC) should be championing the public service space, in both useful and entertaining tools and ideas and that should include investment in ideas from people who may NOT want it to be on the BBC site, but to sit by itself, we still have a lot of market creating support that we could put out there for such ideas.
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