Outrageous Wasters

Tuesday 4th September, BBC3, 9pm
197,000 viewers, 1.06% Audience Share

Radio Times
Series in which a team of eco-experts are on a mission to transform Britain's most wasteful households. The Buchanan family from Glasgow are packed off to purpose-built eco boot camp House of Correction, where they're forced to face up to the impact of their wasteful ways and learn to live a carbon neutral lifestyle. While they're away, their home undergoes a radical eco-makeover, designed to shock them into changing their ways on their return.

Forever Blue - Blue Planet you can take part in

This Wii game looks absolutely amazing, a totally immersive and mesemerising experience - Blue Planet you can take part in!

Forever Blue is a new Wii game that lets you navigate through the deep blue sea with your remote. You're a deep sea diver, and you're surrounded by whales, sharks, manatees, and all kinds of giant, cool sea creatures. You start on a diving boat that takes you out onto the water—then you step into your gear and go..

See a clip (with added Enya music) on Youtube here

Read more on Wikipedia

The BBC developed something called Dinosaur World, which used the same graphics engine as Walking with Dinosaurs, about 6 years ago. Dinosaur World had a concept very similar to Forever Blue (although it was never fully released) - essentially you roamed around a 3-D island exploring the prehistoric vegetation and animals.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/prehistoric_life/games/dinosaur_world/

Geo-Blogs: Jane Goodall & Shackleton are doing it

Spice up your blog and turn it into a GeoBlog. Here's a couple of examples that I am fond of.

The Jane Goodall Institute has a Google Earth-based geoblog. This allows you to open the blog entries in their relevant location on Google Earth providing a geographical context to the writing.

The Shackleton Geoblog is another great example. This time taking a historic adventure and putting it in its geographical context, based on the diary entries and ship logs of Ernest Shackleton during the Endurance expedition.

More information on this geoblog can be read on the Google Earth Community page

Breathing Earth

Breathing Earth gives you a realtime look at the effect that different countries have on climate change. Showing you the amount of Co2 being produced as you watch. It also includes, death rates, birth rates and other interesting data.

Flickrvision & Twittervision

Twittervision and Flickrvision are projects that mashup their communities in real time with Google Maps. A 2-D or 3-D globe shows where people have just uploaded images to Flickr or have updated their Twitter status. Amazing and totally addictive.

Big Brother - Why It's not social documentary (it's just a bunch of hyped up celebrity wannabees pratting around!)

When Big Brother started, I, like the rest of the UK was captivated, the Truman show brought alive! We could relate to the housemates and the encounters they faced, warming to some and despising others. But this is manufactured entertainment more than social documentary – these people are the extremes of society, placed in an extreme environment, the episodes are manufactured, the players are manipulated.

We see some housemates as freaks, bullies, scapegoats who we can blame for societies degradation, while some are the loveable characters – the victims; Nadia “the transsexual” or Pete “the tourette’s sufferer”, whose exposure helps to make society more accepting of difference. In many ways the show does reflect the society we live in, different classes or social groups, elements of the characters reside in all of us. However, it is the meaning and controversy that we extract from the show, issues bubbling under the surface of society, rather than the characters themselves, that we use to construct totems for society’s ills.

Unlike Truman, the housemates know that they are being watched, they know that they could leave BB into a life of “celebrity” and win a huge cash prize, they perform and create parodies of themselves which might just strike a chord with the public – is Jade Goody really as dumb as she would have us believe?

- Paul Williams

Why Geo-tagged content is the NEXT BIG THING

A year ago I would have said that podcasting and blogging are the most significant developments on the web, with regards to public engagement and access - but technology evolves so fast that I now consider these to be “old school” and linear, the current fads are in social networking, global positioning and mashups. When geotagging is mixed with blogs, podcasts and facebook, we have a dynamic way of navigating content, our friends and media - spatially through Google Earth, which has revolutionised the way we view our planet.


When on location I have a little gadget which tracks my GPS coordinates as I go about my work. Back at base I can use this geotrack to geotag my media, view it on Google Earth and remotely share it with my friends over the web. Geotagging is the next big thing and it is how broadcasters and producers can extend the life of their content, making it more dynamic, more immersive and placing it in a global context – particular with regards to natural history and travel.

Audio trials have been carried out with GPS tagged narration to guide you through the streets of a city, and interactive games such as Pacmanhattan carried out on the streets of Washington, but this is just the beginning. As KML files become more common, and wifi networks and GPRS becomes more widespread, our TV and Radio audience will be able to access our geo-tagged content from the exact location in which it was captured, creating audio-visual location based experiences.

- Paul Williams

Incredible Journeys: On the Trail of Caribou

Presented by: Steve Leonard
On BBC1 TONIGHT at 8.00pm

Steve Leonard struggles with the extreme winter of the Yukon as he attempts to migrate across Canada with "Claudia" a heavily pregnant caribou. Hounded by wolves, chased by bears and enduring appalling weather, can Claudia make it to Alaska to deliver her calf?

Natural World- Saving Our Seabirds

TONIGHT 9pm BBC2!
Britain’s seabirds are in crisis; catastrophic breeding failures have swept along our shores, hitting many of our colonies of puffins, arctic terns, guillemots and skuas. Roy Dennis, former warden of the seabird island of Fair Isle, is desperate to understand what’s happening. During the summer of 2006 Roy visited many of Britain’s most spectacular colonies in search of answers, from the Welsh island of Skomer to the outer reaches of the Shetland Isles. What if anything can be done to help and what does the future hold for the amazing seabirds of Britain.

Wolfman

Friday 18th May, 20.00 C5
1.5 Million, 7.2% Audience Share

From RadioTimes:
Fearless Shaun Ellis has been living with wolves for years; he feeds, sleeps and even thinks like them. Using behaviour learned from his pack, he now rehabilitates orphaned pups and enables them to live in the wild. But can Shaun's unique knowledge be used to save a group of Polish sheep-poaching wolves from the farmer's wrath?