There’s a lot of talk about “paywalls”. It’s usually about newspapers, and it’s almost always just about news. It shouldn’t be.

Nor should Rupert Murdoch’s introduction of a pay-to-view model be regarded as an act of desperation. This could be the moment newspapers finally begin to get it right.

Am I willing to pay for a trusted digital offering that helps make my life better, more prosperous, and better informed? Definitely.

WITHIN minutes of speaking to the Queen, the Prime Minister had sent me a quick email. I wasn’t surprised. It was the fourth time he had been in touch in recent weeks. 

Yesterday we attended the invaluable Wired Sussex Media Jobs and Skills Fair. Rather than telling you what it's about, I'll allow the good folks at Wired Sussex to do it for me: "As well as recruiting companies there were also media course providers exhibiting; and in addition to the exhibitors there were separate sessions for students and recent graduates, for freelancers, and for more senior candidates.". We ourselves weren't actually there recruiting for any positions in  particular, rather we were just in the Made in Brighton section to chat to attendees and support Wired Sussex and local students.
 
We took along the hideous face munging software to attract the curious to our stall. This sparked a broad spectrum of emotions, ranging from a horrified student who (understandably) couldn't cope with having my face, to a very impressed charismatic man who was poking his tongue out at the screen and making odd noises. Andy had the fortune of munging his face with the Mayoress, which I don't think many people can lay claim to.

Last Friday I attended a CSS3 Wizardry Workshop run by local front-end web development company Clearleft. The workshop aimed to "blow our minds" with a day long set of lectures and exercises teaching myself and a few other front-end web developers the powerful new additions to the latest iteration of CSS.

CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is the language used to determine the presentation of a HTML page. If you've ever viewed a website with CSS disabled then you'll know just how integral this language has become in laying out modern webpages. Browsers today support CSS2 across the board (though ask a developer about IE6's CSS support and you'll be met with a groan and a grimace), but it's the very latest browser releases that support CSS3 that are pushing the limits of how we can design and display webpages. To put this in context, have a look at Chris's personal website with CSS enabled, and then without it, below:

We started off with a look at the new selectors that can be used to grab any section of the HTML markup. Previously restricted to relatively simple selectors forcing us to target elements by their IDs and class names, we can now use these new selectors to attach styles to (naming but a few here) siblings, children and adjacent elements. These additions will allow developers to produce cleaner HTML without as many classes and ID names cluttering up every div, p and span declaration.

Easter egg hunts are nothing new to the physical or digital world. Whether it was the search for the chocolately goodness I so enjoyed during the springs of my childhood (and adolescence... and teenage years... and last year) or the eternal hunt for the hidden digital gems that plague my time with DVDs, the internet and various other media of recent years, the promise of finding that ever-elusive prize was always of great interest to me.

All right, I'll admit, I might be over selling it just a bit there, but who can say they don't enjoy the occasional easter egg when they stumble across it? My interest in the subject piqued again recently when I stumbled across a pseudo-egg in the BBC iPlayer website. Whilst trying to catch up with some Mock the Week antics, I found myself unable to hear Frankie Boyle's musings on how much he hates, well, everything. On examination, I noticed the iPlayer volume was down, so I went to turn it up (as you do). Lo and behold, on doing this otherwise innocuous task, I found that the iPlayer volume goes up to none other than 11.

Any Spinal Tap fans out there will immediately grasp the relevance of the volume going up to this number. In an infamous scene in the mockumentary 'This is Spinal Tap', guitarist Nigel Tufnel debates with Marty DiBergi the importance of having an amp that goes all the way up to 11 to make it louder, as opposed to just increasing the volume of 10.

I attended the BBC Knowledge Multiplatform briefing day yesterday. The strategy outlined by Simon Nelson and others thankfully counteracted the soporific effects of being located in an airless room in the bowels of Broadcasting House, as the sun beat down on the London streets (it ain’t called the ‘big smoke’ for nothing).

Here are the highlights:

On ‘Permanence’ – Signalling a radical shift from the ephemerality of the linear broadcast slot, the BBC now has a system to automatically generate a permanent web page for every programme episode which, over time, can be further enriched with ratings, recommendations, synopses, AV, track listings and so on. As well as prolonging the life of the content beyond transmission and making it findable and linkable, the system has released time and budget previously spent on often rapidly pulled together and under-performing programme-related sites.  It’s currently in its beta version - visit it here.

So far so good; I can find out more about that track I liked in last week’s Mad Men for example. But what is so much more exciting is the prospect of applying the same system to the BBC archive – tens of decades of radio and television content opened up and made findable, shareable and mashable. Of course, as with most BBC projects of this scale and ambition – from the launch of BBC Two through expansion from terrestrial to digital in the late 90s to the launch of the iPlayer in late 2007 - the usual debates around public service and commercialism will no doubt rage.

Will the content be free at the point of use? Will it be limited to British people as licence-fee payers or made globally available but at a fee to non-UK residents? How might the release of such content impact upon the broader commercial market? These are just some of the potential areas of contention. I assume the findings from the Creative Archive pilot will feed significantly into the BBC’s thinking from here.