It's the job of this blog to share interesting and important things that the BBC's up to in the digital space. But it only works because of the active participation of the blog's community engaging and asking questions. Keep up the good work.

In the time that I've been here there have been lots of good things on the blog and interesting conversations on other websites that we've linked to on BBC Internet blog's delicious feed (also available via Twitter). Here are a few we featured on delicious recently:

On the Online Journalism Blog Paul Bradshaw criticises BBC news stories for happily quoting data but not linking to the data itself or publish it in full:

"In the world of print and broadcast, narrowing a story to fit space was a regrettable limitation of the medium; in the online world, linking to your sources is a fundamental quality of the medium. Not doing so looks either ignorant or arrogant."

Visual designer Paul Robert Lloyd is an enthusiast for the BBC News redesign:

"There is often talk of there being no landmark design on the web. I’m going to stick my neck out, and suggest it won’t be long before BBC News Online is considered one of the greatest design icons online today."

It was announced last week that Project Canvas will be called YouView. Martin Belam wrote:

"Whilst most people have concerned themselves with whether the YouView logo is a little too close to Star Wars for comfort, personally I'm delighted to see that, as a project involving the BBC, the new website homepage has obeyed Currybet's Law."

BBC iPlayer is now available on more and more devices such as Sony's new TVs.

A recent FOI request for some iPlayer bandwidth info has been answered.

There’s a new kid on the BBC blogging block in the shape of the BBC Radio blog.

Paul Murphy was the Editor of the BBC Internet blog.

• In total the BBC iPlayer received 119 million requests for programmes across all platforms in August 2010, including both online platforms and devices and BBC iPlayer on Virgin Media TV. Requests are much higher than August 2009 with 70 million requests for TV programmes and 28 million for radio programmes, whilst requests on Virgin Media were up to 21 million.
• BBC iPlayer’s most requested title in August was Top Gear, with episode 6 attracting over 1 million requests.  Sherlock and documentary Madness In The Fast Lane also delivered strongly, as did the BBC Three Adult Season.  For radio, Fry’s English Delight attracted the most requests, followed by football and Test Match Special.
• Live TV viewing via the BBC iPlayer dropped back again this month to the level seen before the start of the World Cup.

Download the August 2010 BBC iPlayer Press Pack .

Paul Murphy is the Editor of the BBC Internet blog.

The Internet Standards role involves liaison with various Internet and Web organisational and technical bodies to allow the BBC to influence and shape future standards, build prototypes to prove or disprove emerging research, and feed into new BBC products and services to create innovative new user experiences.

You can read the rest of the job description on BBC Jobs. The closing date is 12 September.

• In July 2010, the BBC iPlayer received 114 million requests for programmes across all platforms, including both online platforms and devices and BBC iPlayer on Virgin Media TV.
• Requests still remain significantly higher than July 2009 with 68 million requests for TV programmes and 27 million were for radio programmes, whilst requests on Virgin Media were up to 19 million.
• The most-requested TV title for July was Top Gear, with some episodes attracting over 1 million requests reach. New BBC one drama titles also performed well, as did comedy, and the start of the BBC Three Adult Season.
• Live TV, viewing via the BBC iPlayer fell back to relatively normal levels in July as the World Cup came to a close.

Download the BBC iPlayer stats pack for July 2010 (PDF).

Paul Murphy is the Editor of the BBC Internet blog.

Apparently it's archive week at the BBC and there are blog posts all over the BBC and an excellent Guardian Tech weekly podcast to mark this auspicious occasion. In case you missed them (and there are a couple more to come before the end of the week) here they are in full:

• Project manager Helen Papadopoulos blogs on BBC Genome which will "bring the broadcast history of the BBC to life". Genome involves creating of an online catalogue of every BBC programme ever broadcast and it starts by scanning every issue of the Radio Times.
• Roly Keating, the BBC's Director of Archive Content, introduces the latest online archive collection featuring British novelists in their own words and goes on to talk about the importance of putting historically important material online.
• As this one's on the Internet blog you will have probably seen it already: Adrian Williams, Digitisation Group Manager, blogs on the huge collection of items in the BBC archive at Windmill Road.
• Richard Wright from BBC Research & Development describes the work of BBC R&D and its partners in preserving and maintaining historical broadcasting assets.
• You can also see a short film on the BBC YouTube Channel which takes you on a tour of the Windmill Road archive.

Update: 20th August: see also Peter Skinner's post "A New Home For the BBC Archive" on the About The BBC blog (NR).

Nevali has not only been making some salient points on this blog he's also been busy on his own blog, most recently responding to BBC online boss Erik Hugger's post HTML5, open standards, and the BBC. It's worth reading Line-by-line: HTML5, open standards, and the BBC in full.

And nevali's previous post is a nice follow up to Meet the Green Button! New Developments on Freeview+ and Freeview+HD: Trailer Booking which featured on the R&D blog (and I missed cross-posting it because I was on holiday).

Max Gadney from BBC multiplatform introduced the prototype of Dimensions, a juxtapostion of historical data with stuff you know based on your location. Matt Jones from BERG, the people who created it, explains all on the BERG blog. Go have a play with it.

Paul Murphy is the Editor of the Internet blog. Before you ask this is the info I have about the image from the archive:
"BBC News Editing 01/01/1998 BBC, BBC News Editing, News VT Tape Transfer in BBC TV Centre London. Beta Video Recorders."

The About the BBC blog has got the details behind the launch of the World Music archive. The archive is on the Radio 3 website and includes an interactive map for those of us whose geography is better than our musical sensibilities.

The BBC launched their first mobile app having secured BBC Trust approval following a false start earlier this year. The Independent wrote:

"The BBC Trust has given plans to deliver content through dedicated smartphone applications (apps) the green light, after ruling that they were not a significant change to the BBC's existing public services and did not need further scrutiny."

Not surprisingly the Newspaper Publishers Association who helped trigger the Trust review were disappointed with the outcome. David Newell, director of the NPA, is quoted in a Media Week story:

"The launch of BBC mobile apps represents a significant change to the BBC Online service, and we believe it will have a significant and negative market impact upon the viability of the business models of commercial news organisations in the app market."

On his blog Martin Belam of The Guardian and previously of the BBC wonders if the BBC Trust should have done a Public Value Test before allowing the BBC News app into the Apple store.

You can read the research commissioned by the BBC Trust (and reported by Paidcontent) to help assess whether to give BBC apps the go ahead. The report by Mediatique (PDF is here) says:

"The BBC would be entering a market that is already trending toward free apps (in news, sport and long-form video content) and is likely to trend further in that direction over time, irrespective of the BBC's entry."

The Daily Mail has a story on Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt's appearance on Sunday's Andrew Marr Show:

"Viewers who watch television on their computer could be forced to pay the licence fee as early as next year. Those who do not own a TV but watch programmes on services such as the BBC's iPlayer do not have to pay the £145.50 annual charge."

Paul Murphy is the Editor of the BBC Internet blog.

• In total the BBC iPlayer received 117 million requests for programmes across all platforms in June 2010, including both online platforms and devices and BBC iPlayer on Virgin Media TV
• Other BBC Online sites received significant increases in traffic month on month, as audiences went online for coverage of events and the ability to stream live content from the World Cup, Wimbledon and Glastonbury BBC sites
• The World Cup also delivered exceptional request numbers for both live and catch-up radio on BBC iPlayer in June, with the England v Slovenia game easily the most requested programme for the month by some margin.
• Requests from mobile devices also increased another point, boosted by both live World Cup listening, and by the adoption of BBC iPlayer on iPad, which is already delivering 10% of all requests coming from portable devices
• BBC iPlayer's most-requested TV titles for June continued to include Doctor Who, EastEnders and Junior Apprentice, plus new BBC3 content Lee Nelson, Peckham Finishing School and Mongrels, and of course the England v Slovenia World Cup match.

"As a part of its Salford-based lab being established at MediaCityUK, BBC R&D wishes to recruit a Lead Technologist to lead the work of the audio R&D engineering team that will be based in this lab.

Lead Technologist (Audio)

This is an exciting opportunity for someone with a background in audio R&D and a proven track record in leading R&D teams to play a key role in the development of the new lab and to shape the BBC's future audio R&D work. The initial areas of research are likely to include periphony, spatial audio and Ambisonics, and the related areas of room acoustics, but could expand to include any aspects of media-related audio R&D.

As the BBC R&D team in our North lab builds out it's capabilities and facilities we need a world class technical leader to focus our audio work.  This role is critical to developing the excellence in audio we want at the heart of our operation, and it'll sit right in the nexus of industrial and academic partnerships that will span the region, the UK and the wider industry."

See the original post on the R&D blog.

"...a future where the BBC will have two distinct online functions - iPlayer will have an important role providing on-demand radio and TV-like content while BBC Online should also remain a publisher of distinctive, original public service material for the web. We agree the first step should be to simplify the existing content on BBC Online and to strengthen editorial control of its future development."

The 25% cuts in BBC online's budget looks certain to happen:

"We conclude now, in line with the BBC Executive's strategy proposals, that there is a bigger challenge for Online - to cut back on the current scale and scope of what is published and put the focus on those areas where the BBC has a clear and distinctive role to play."

The Trust stresses the importance of access to content for users:

"Get BBC services free at the point of use, in ways and on devices that suit them"

Simultaneously the BBC published its annual report.

Paul Murphy is the Editor of the BBC Internet blog.

Today's news is that the BBC Trust have given conditional approval to the BBC's involvement in Project Canvas. Conditions include the publication of the "completed elements of the Canvas core technical specification ....within 20 working days from this final approval", and "the final core technical specification will be published no later than eight months before launch of the first set-top boxes". Read the full set of conditions here.

The people who deal with FOI requests at the Beeb are being kept busy by Intenet blog regular Paul Jakma. On his blog Paul has published More BBC iPlayer Encryption FOI Materials which includes two interesting papers: "Pan-BBC Approach to Combating Piracy" and "Public/Press reaction to introduction of SWF Verification on iPlayer - Briefing Paper". Both PDFs are available on Paul's blog.

Briantist, aka Brian Butterworth (or should that be Brian Butterworth aka Briantist?), has put together the excellent little icon iPlayer image featured at the top of this round up.

On the Backstage list he wrote:

"I read http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jun/16/stephen-fry-doctor-who

So, I found a folder with 15,871 very small caches of the pictures used for each of the iPlayer programmes. Well, they were when I removed 90,000 duplicates. I've made 5,000 of the programme images into a single relevant image.

http://bnb.bpweb.net/iplayerimages/

Zoom in."

Some interesting things you might have missed in our delicious feed (You can also follow the BBC on Blogs delicious feed on Twitter):

As always there's some good stuff on the R&D blog including Prototyping George Wright's Weeknotes and The Value of Everyting: a meeting where the British Library, the BFI and BBC's R&D "came together to work out, jointly, the future for preserving and accessing file-based BBC content."

What HiFi? reported BBC confirms use of variable bit-rate encoding on HD channel saying:

"What does this mean? Well basically, it's a process which maintains a similar average bit-rate despite being able to allocate more bandwidth for more demanding scenes - such as fast-action sports like football - when required."

Wednesday's World Cup game between England and Slovenia racked up a record number of views for the online stream and there's some good analysis of the numbers from the always excellent James Cridland on his blog. It's also worth looking at Paidcontent's Five Percent Of English Soccer Viewers Watched Match Online.

The Archive team have put up a World Cup collection, starting with interviews with the 1966 World Cup winning squad but over the next couple of weeks they'll be adding to it.

Finally but most importantly Backstage's Ian Forrester is back and getting better. He's written a couple of very eloquent posts (Thank you part 1 and Thank you part 2) on Cubicgarden.com that had the Internet blog quite tearful. Brilliant news.

Paul Murphy is the Editor of the Internet blog.

During the festival the Glastonbury website will have live video streams, webcams, 6 Music's radio coverage, live chat and hundreds of photos on it. Delivering all this content from the middle of a field is a technical challenge to say the least. This is just some of the work we've been doing before both the crowds and our BBC colleagues arrive.

Read the rest of this post on the BBC Music blog.

Graham Thomas writes:

"BBC R&D's website has a selection of project pages describing current projects, many of which come under the 'Production' banner.  I thought I'd give a bit more background on how some of these projects fit together, and how the work is organised.  I lead the 'Production Magic' section of R&D - a team of 17 people that looks after new developments in the area of programme production technology, focusing on audio and video signal processing.  All the projects currently listed under 'Production' come from my section."

Read the rest of the post Introducing Production Magic Section on the R&D blog.

Jo Wickremasinghe, the Head of Homepage and Syndication Services, has added a new comment to let users know what's happening with customisation and the homepage.

Paidcontent have the story BBC Declines To Publish Canvas Spec, Until Autumn. Paidcontent's Robert Andrews had previously submitted an FOI request for the Canvas spec which has now been turned down by the BBC saying:

"It is in the public interest that this information should be disclosed to all licence-fee payers at the same time, rather than provided in advance to one individual."

And one you probably haven't missed, the launch of the new iPlayer beta. We've had a number of very good posts on the blog so here's a round up to date:

• Anthony Rose's post outlining the new features of the beta
• James Hewines replies to feedback
• Putting the iPlayer on the iPad
• Audience research and decisions about the new iPlayer interface BBC iD and iPlayer
• Behind the scenes of BBC iPlayer

Paul Murphy is the Editor of the Internet blog.

As well as the BBC's official How to and tips guide, The Guardian have produced their own Need to Know guide.

Among other stories that emerged yesterday in the announcement was the BBC's support for the imminently available iPad from Apple. The Telegraph covered the story (and implied that it would be via an app and got corrected in several places including here as well as in their own comments) as did The Register who produced our second favourite headline of the day: "BBC iPlayer to run on iPads. Eventually".

The Register story includes some quotes from the press conference yesterday including this one from Erik Huggers:

"We're not wedded to Flash. Let's be really clear about that,,, Having over 25 devices out there for BBC iPlayer means we are quite flexible about the technologies we use to get our service out to consumers. Not all of our services are powered by Flash. The iPad is a very interesting device, the screen size is right, the battery life is right, and we will make iPlayer services available."

And this from Anthony Rose:

"For downloads you need to have rights management to limit the time availability. To do that you need DRM. The only DRM that works on Apple devices is Apple DRM which is a closed system. So for downloads, they are off limits for the moment. But for streaming there should be no problem... Sometimes we play out using RTMP, sometimes we use SSL, sometimes we use HTTP. It depends on the resolution of the content. On low resolution mobile devices, as with an iPhone, you sometimes don't need protection. As you get to higher resolution ones, you do. On iPad we're likely to use SSL based streaming."

The Telegraph also covered what's known as iPlayer interlinking whereby metadata from other broadcasters shows up in iPlayer searches with an external link to the programme. Their headline though would seem to imply more than that: Every terrestrial TV programme to be available via BBC iPlayer.

Catchy headline but not true. PaidContent's "BBC iPlayer Will Link To Commercial VOD Services" is probably more accurate.

And one last piece of feedback (from The Register) for the iPlayer team:

...and while we're at it, this is completely off topic but: to the people who made the BBC3 iPlayer ident, please please please get the audio remastered properly. I've stuck my head inside jet engines that were quieter. If I get my ears blasted by that thing one more time I'm calling my lawyer. Okay?

• April 2010 was the best performing month for BBC iPlayer with 123 million request for BBC TV and Radio programmes, up from 118 million in March 2010
• Online requests also hit an all time high at 104 million, up 3 million from March 2010
• The new series of Doctor Who also chalked up a new record of the highest number of requests a single programme has received in its first week, with 1.6 million requests for Episode 1. Outnumbered and Russell Howard's Good News also performed well
• BBC iPlayer has also released a new beta version of the service

Paul Murphy is the Editor of the Internet blog.