Gavin, 24 January 05
I came across an interesting 404 page when trying to find out when the BBCs royal charter was up for renewal. It’s clearly an attempt to start a meme on the lines of the ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction Not Found 404’. I’d not normally link to such a site for fear of adding whatever measly google-juice this page generates. However Google has implemented nofollow in a far too late attempt to thwart comment spam. I’m not sure if I am abusing the nofollow tag when I use it for the 404 page link, perhaps if Google had chosen something like ‘usercomment’ as the tag I’d have second thoughts.
The reason I don’t like the idea of spreading this meme is not because of some unconditional love of the BBC. They pump out reality crap like the rest, fail to foster innovation (killed off ogg vorbis projects) and rarely provide an opportunity for minority political views to be heard. But despite it all I would say I’d agree with Bloggerheads and believe in the BBC.
The BBC and in particular the licence fee is an easy target; as with any tax – nobody wants to pay, but until there is a moneyless society, it’s just one of those things. The vitriol against the BBC has been stepped up in the past few years and it’s not too difficult to pinpoint the main source.
The Murdoch empire’s SKY broadcasting produces little real programming. It depends on repeats of BBC series and cheap imports. Greg Dyke – whatever else you think of him – had one or two decent ideas. He was persuaded by Lawrence Lessig of Creative Commons that opening the corporations archive was the way forward and at the 2003 Edinburgh TV festival he announced that the establishment of a BBC open archive.
With broadband becoming more widespread the question will be do you pay Rupert £19 a month for endless repeats, or download them from the BBC open archive. Like the GNU/Linux computer system, whatever you end up paying it’s a different kind of free.
