BBC Open Air: Being a location-aware news organization
Posted in Apps, Geospatial Technology, Mobile on August 27th, 2009 by Justin – CommentsThe BBC news organization is known to be innovative, and its latest initiative, BBC Open Air, is no exception. Put together by the BBC Learning Innovations group, BBC Open Air is an experimental website that utilizes Google Gears to find a mobile phone’s location, and then uses the location metadata to return results from Breathing Places and BBC Weather. If you’re not familiar with Breathing Places, it’s a BBC campaign focused on ways to get closer to nature.
Essentially, BBC Open Air will return local weather information and the nearest outdoor points of interest related to nature once it figures out your location. Currently, only Google Android-based phones and some newer Windows Mobile models support Google Gears, but the Learning Innovations group is working on extending support. Gears is supported by the Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer internet browsers as well, but only in the form of a third-party plugin. This means you can use Open Air on a laptop or netbook if you install Gears into the mentioned supported browsers.
For the time being, Open Air is just a test site and likely has a few bugs. But the Learning Innovations group is taking user feedback and using it to tweak and extend the service. I’m looking forward to seeing this experiment grow, and I hope other content producers begin to utilize location metadata in new and innovative ways as well.