Launch of backstage.bbc.co.uk -- Ben Metcalfe

"What are you wearing?” “A kilt.” “No man, that’s a skirt…” “It’s a kilt. I’m telling you…” “Uhhh it’s pink, has flowers and shoulder straps.” “It’s a pretty kilt.“ From: bash.org.

The third session of the day was introduced by Ben Hammersley in a kilt. Which he then pulled up as he ran up the stairs and gave the first three rows, and the speaker (who he obviously knew) a view of his arse; fortunately this was after the lunch break.

Un-phased by this Ben Metcalfe gave a very lively presentation on BBC Backstage, the official blurb gives a pretty good overview: Build what you want using BBC content. backstage.bbc.co.uk is the BBC’s developer network to encourage innovation and support new talent. Content feeds are available for people to build with on a non-commercial basis.

The talk basically covered the why and what of BBC backstage and introduced some of the APIs available and some prototype applications that people have written. The speaker knew his stuff (he’s the project lead after all) and was both enthusiastic and passionate; it made the whole session a lot of fun and has inspired me to have a play with the new APIs so I guess it worked.

The talk was also used to launch a BBC competition to get people tinkering with the backstage products. The prize is a rack mount server and should encourage some neat applications.