"Put down that wrench!"

You can now access the BBC's programme catalogue online. It doesn't contain listings for all of their radio and television programmes, but it's as comprehensive as you're likely to get, and goes back at least as far as the early 1950s. All I need to do now is think of something interesting to do with the data.

I've also seen the following web toy (I hesitate before saying "mashup", because that might provoke a desire to kill in some of you) which combines Google Maps and a NASA land elevation dataset to give a graphical display of what we're likely to expect if/when sea levels rise due to global warming and collapsing ice sheets. It's marginally comforting to see that Gark Villa will survive a 5m rise in sea level, even if it is likely to be inundated by a 6m rise.

The BBC have been carrying a story today on the rise of Web 2.0 and Flock, to tie in with a report on this evening's Newsnight (the report can be seen on the Newsnight website for the next twenty-four hours). I can't say that I'm too impressed.

I've tried Flock (see my earlier comments), and have found it to be a generally unimpressive experience, in that it doesn't add any significantly new additional browser functionality that was not already available as extensions to Firefox. Given that Flock is probably about 98+% Firefox in terms of lines of code, this doesn't justify the hype that has surrounded the release of Flock 0.5 alpha. Granted, it does have quite a pretty new skin, but that's not exactly earth-shattering.

Flock is the most recent piece of software to be identified with what is fast becoming known as Web 2.0. The view that we are seeing a phase change in the nature of the Web is quite prevalent amongst some of the more vocal parts of the blogorati, and amongst some of the refugees from the dotcom boom, but it's more style than substance. Certainly, there's nothing about Web 2.0 systems that was not possible with existing (Web 1.0) technologies. Instead, we're being asked to believe that Web 2.0 is a different way of thinking about the Web, a Web where all can participate equally, and where useful services spring unbidden from social interactions.

A central theme of Web 2.0 is therefore that of emergent intelligence, that together we're somehow smarter than we are individually. This doesn't sound particularly 2.0 to me, but rather too much like some of the more hyperbolic future-posturing from the pages of WiReD magazine c. 1998. On a more cynical note, I could add that the Web 2.0 is a kneejerk reaction from those members of the blogorati that prefer syntactic XML markup to the more stable foundation for shared understanding that is afforded by the Semantic Web, and that they're sleepwalking into the very problems that the Semantic Web is designed to mitigate against, but that would just be petty of me.

Both the BBC News report and the segment on tonight's Newsnight were quite reminiscent of the mainstream media hype during the dotcom boom in the sheer breathlessness of the reporting. The web report was centred on Barcamp in Amsterdam earlier this month, but the television report also featured footage from the O'Reilly-organised Web 2.0 Conference (with about ten seconds of a Cory Doctorow rant, and some pictures of stories from Make:) . In the television report, Paul Mason interviewed Andy Smith and Chris Messina of Flock, who had "built a new web browser". As I've already stated, I think that statement is quite disingenuous. The BBC News report notes that Flock is based on Firefox, but the Newsnight segment didn't go so far as to even mention this debt. Overall, I'm very disappointed by this sort of reporting from the BBC. It was largely devoid of analysis, and just repeated the Web 2.0 hype uncritically.

In short, I wasn't expecting the BBC to drink the Kool Aid.