Bbc News & Articles

The BBC's iPlayer (news, site) helped drag its home British audience into the video-on-demand age. Now it's going global with both current ouput and decades of classic shows on offer.

YouTube (news, site) plans to spend big bucks in an attempt to raise its service from pushing video clips to full-length movies.

The British Broadcasting Corporation (news, site) has expanded its online presence wildly and enthusiastically for years, but with government belt-tightening and competitive pressure, the time has come to scale back.

Recently, the Association of Online Publishers (AOP), an organization based in the UK that represents digital publishing companies that create original, branded, quality content, announced the recipients of its Digital Publishing Awards for 2010.

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• Is Either Gender More Social Online?
• Facebook Shows Strong Presence In Asia/Middle East
• Google Launches an App Store for Google Apps
• General Public Believes in Wide-Reaching and Open Internet

First Microsoft's Interoperability Team announced a PHP Toolkit, then we saw Microsoft throw their support behind the CodePlex.org Foundation, and we hear rumors of a new open source content management system. So now what?

Well the Microsoft Interoperability Team has announced support for the open source IDE Eclipse. At the Eclipse Summit Europe, they offered up a few new solutions in partnership with open source companies Tasktop Technologies and Soyatec:

• An Enhanced Developer Experience for Eclipse on Windows 7
• Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse
• Windows Azure Software Developer Kit (SDK) for Java
• Eclipse Tools for Silverlight

Microsoft provides funding and architectural guidance on the projects.

According to Microsoft, the goal here is to "help developers using the Eclipse platform take advantage of the new features in Windows 7 and Window Server 2008 R2, and reinforce Java and PHP interoperability with Windows Azure and Microsoft Silverlight."

You can get all the details on these four projects on Microsoft's Interoperability blog.

And while these projects sound interesting, there's another one underway that caught our attention: Microsoft has joined up with IBM, Zend Technologies, and others to work on a new open source, cloud interoperability project.

Called Simple API for Cloud Application Services, this project is designed to help create basic cloud applications that will run in all of the major cloud platforms. This would include the Amazon Web Services, even though Amazon is not part of the project. 

The hardest part of writing web content is making it standards compliant to allow all visitors to use your site and for those with mobile devices to view it properly. The latest version of Ephox's (news, site) EditLive! allows even non-technical users to create standards-compliant content, accessible to all.

If you think your company failed to recognize the merit of its website until recently, you’re not alone. The British Broadcasting Company is taking another look at its online efforts and investing new monies after reports showed that its website has earned nearly four percent of its total revenues in just 18 months.

Initially, they had aimed at securing 10 percent of revenues from their online property, over time, but now according to BBC Worldwide Chief Executive John Smith, “we have [probably] under-egged the extent to which we will see more of our revenues coming from the Internet.”