If you're one of the nation's 5 million BBC iPlayer users (or perhaps, for our US friends, one of 40 million Hulu users) the murky boundaries between 'using the internet' and 'watching TV' will be familiar. From enjoying shows online to - in the near future - reading news and catching up on e-mails on our plasma TVs, the magical process of 'convergence' is charging its way into the new decade. When you can sit on the bus and watch live TV with the rather spiffing TVCatchup, you know the days of bluntly differentiating between computing devices and TVs are numbered.

Technology firms hoping to catch such disruptive waves of change meet annually at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, boasting the wares they hope will enter our homes in coming years. It's a veritable trend-seekers paradise, and one particular trend at this year's event leapt out (almost literally). 3D TVs, capable of showing the new breed of 3D films like James Cameron's Avatar in all their splendour, will eventually find their way into our living rooms. That alone is revelatory, but in parallel with the convergence stampede presents one huge floating 3D question mark for interface design.

Experiments with 3D interfaces are not new, but have begun gaining traction with the emergence of gesture-based devices, particularly multi-touch devices like the all-conquering iPhone and Microsoft's Surface. One approach I've been watching with interest is BumpTop, revealed with an eye-opening TED talk (listen to the oohs and aahs) and now available to the public.

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.

Okay so this post doesn't sound as exciting as Codeos and round-ups of fun stuff but it's still worth a few moments of your time...

We're all very pleased to say that our latest Cogapp-developed museum website launched a couple of months ago, created for the National Portrait Gallery. In fact, our working relationship with the Gallery goes way back to 1990s (remember them?), when we were commissioned to build their 'original' site, the Portrait Explorer kiosks and an accompanying CD-ROM.

The existing site was very much of its time: based on databases and built with HyperCard, it consisted mostly of flat, static pages.  By 2008, when our work on the new site began, the needs of both staff and visitors had evolved and we clearly needed to take a completely fresh approach. Not least to the back-end processes through which Gallery staff update and add to the site.

At the heart of this new approach was our selection and use of a new content management system, or CMS. Just in case you don't know: a CMS is a tool that facilitates the creation, editing and control of web content, usable even by those who have no technical training. For a client like the National Portrait Gallery, this means that staff at the Gallery can easily and visibly update their own content while the site remains live. A CMS gives the user a lot of autonomy and flexibility because they're not tied to the developer to make small changes to layout and other minor revisions. Most of all, using a CMS is completely separate from the back-end processes, meaning that if anything goes wrong, it's most probably the developer's fault, which hopefully makes it easier to fix! And finally, a CMS ensures that content is separate from design. If changes to layout are made, it doesn't affect the valuable, often very substantial content.

Joe Baskerville (Cogapp's Head of New Technology) and I went to Washington recently for the annual conference of the Museum Computer Network, where we were each presenting in a session.  MCN is always one of my favourite conferences to attend, not least because it is quite small, non-commercial, and most of the attendees are hands-on doing things with computers for museums.  So it's very friendly; and technical without being ludicrously geeky or divorced from practical uses for the technology.  As witness, my favourite slide of the conference (from an excellent and very well attended session on the Semantic Web from the Met's Koven Smith and Don Undeen):

Last month saw the first meeting of a Brighton-based group called Culture Geeks. The idea is to link up people from technical fields (geeks) with people from the world of museums, heritage, etc. (culture). The event started with a great presentation by Karina Rodriguez Echavarria, a researcher at the University of Brighton. Her talk focussed on the use of 3D by cultural institutions, and specifically the various techniques to capture, process and display it.