The party's got to stop

I'm finding it very depressing to sit down to breakfast and be assailed by newspaper headlines like "Staring into the abyss" and doom and gloom on the radio news. It's all particularly galling when one hasn't been involved in the cause of the current global meltdown. So my heart did lift a little when I got to the letters page of today's Financial Times and read a letter that chimed with what I feel. It came from the former deputy governor of the National Bank of Poland, and reads:

From Dr Krzysztof Rybinski.

Sir, Imagine that there is a wild party, a long one. Every time the alcohol supply dries up, the central bank shows up and keeps the party going and going, and people get more and more addicted to partying and drinking. At some stage, the drunken crowd demolishes the premises and the party is over.

Hank and Ben show up and ask who did the most damage. John, people say, broke four windows and smashed the table. Great, says Hank, John will get $300 - who is next on the did-most-damage list? Tim, the crowd cries, he sprayed paint all over the place and burned the sofa. Excellent, says Hank, Tim will get $250. Who is next?

In a few days, the next party will begin. People are planning to show up in large numbers. Not only can they have a lot of fun (while others - obviously jerks and dorks - will go to work every morning) and drink for free - they will also get free cash handouts when the party is over. How do you like the Paulson plan?

Krzysztof Rybinski,

Former Deputy Governor,

National Bank of Poland,

Warsaw, Poland

Curiously, I've been reading a speech from another Pole this week concerning public service broadcasting and its need to adapt to public service media. It's well written and well thought through. Perhaps we ought to look to Poland to save all our souls at the moment.

Shameless plug?

This year's AIB Awards have taken everyone involved by surprise. With more than three times received this year than the number of entries submitted in 2007, it seems that these Awards have truly captured the imagination of broadcasters, online producers and technologists the world over.

The shortlisting process turned into a mammoth task (we'd expected perhaps 30 or 40 more entries than last year), but because we wanted to be scrupulously fair to all entrants, our shortlisting team has watched every TV programme submitted, listened to every radio entry, tested every cross-media production, and thought long and hard about the marketing and technology entries. This work has brought us to a shortlist of around 24% of the total entries, and we've posted this online at www.aib.org.uk.

Now it's up to our judges who are spread around the world, from the US to Australia, Ghana to South Africa, Germany to Denmark, and many other places in between. We'll be keeping the results absolutely secret until we present the Awards on 12 November.

So the reason for calling this a shameless plug? Because I want to encourage you to book your seats at the 2008 AIB Awards taking place in London on 12 November. It's going to be a truly great evening, celebrating success in international media and offering many unexpected insights into the way global media is developing. You can book online at www.aib.org.uk - but be quick: when I checked this afternoon, one third of the places had already been reserved!

Nobody's monitoring the output...

Last night I thought I'd catch up with one of the episodes of 'Britain from Above' on the BBC HD channel that I'd missed because I'd been away. I duly tuned in and started to watch.

But something wasn't quite right. The DOG (digital on-screen graphic) with the BBC HD logo wasn't alone. The BBC HD Preview logo was still being radiated, meaning that there was a ghostly shadow and a redundant "Preview" on the top left of the screen.

I picked up the phone and rang Red Bee Media's Duty Engineer (Red Bee Media handles the playout of the BBC's TV channels, and many others in the UK) and let him know about the problem. Within a couple of minutes the errant Preview DOG disappeared.

What's curious to me is that it seems nobody within the BBC is monitoring its output...in years gone by, the Presentation Department at Television Centre made sure that programmes were being transmitted as they should. Today, there seems to be a general abdication of responsibility for output in the multi-channel world and it's up to sharp-eyed viewers to alert broadcasters when things are going wrong.

Spam's being beaten at last

Just about every e-mail address on the AIB domain is extensively spammed. It's grown to such a proportion that we've been testing a number of spam filters to try and solve the ever-growing problem.

After a fairly rigorous set of tests, we settled on Spamfighter, a collaborative programme that makes use of the wisdom of the crowd - the Spamfighter community - to identify and remove spam from users' computers. It's a simple application that you can download and will remove spam from every e-mail account that you have on a PC. If one slips through the net, you simply press "Block" on the e-mail program and the spam item is moved to the Spamfighter folder, and the Spamfighter central database is updated. It seems to work incredibly effectively.

In fact, I took a look at the Spamfighter statistics today. Since we applied the "paid for" version of the program in July, the system has filtered well over 40,000 spam e-mails. Yes, 40,000+. That's the scale of the problem this small but international organisation faces. Horrific.

Then I realised that the spam problem was transferring itself to my newly-acquired Blackberry. I'd resisted getting one of these devices for a long time, thinking that it was simpler to deal with e-mails in the office, but the trouble when you travel quite a bit is there's a constant backlog that slows down your return. So I got a Blackberry before going on holiday in July. Trouble was, using the Blackberry Desktop Redirector every item of mail arriving was automatically forwarded as the Redirector worked instantly, before Spamfighter could kick in.

I searched high and low for a solution and today have found it. Thanks to a post on www.slivka.com (dating back to 2004) I found a registry edit that allows you to put in a delay on the Redirector. Despite not liking tampering with the registry, I duly followed the instructions and, hey presto, the Redirector is delayed by 30 seconds giving Spamfighter ample time to work. So, no more spam on the Blackberry. Great.

Here's the registry edit instructions to save you looking:
Step 1. Go to Start > Run and type "regedit" and click OK.
Step 2. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software >Research In Motion > BlackBerry > Redirector. Change the value of the ProcessMailDelay entry to 30. If this value fails to address the issue, then modify the value to be 60.
Note: If the ProcessMailDelay value is not present, create it as a DWORD Value and set the Value data to Decimal 30.
Step 3. close the Redirector and Desktop Manager applications, then restart both to force these changes to take effect.

Good luck!

Germany's media debate same as everywhere

I'm in Berlin for the annual Medienwoche debates and to discover what's new in consumer electronics.

The first day of the Medienwoche conference demonstrated that the conflicts between public and private media rumble on, with private media companies complaining loudly that publicly-funded broadcasters are moving into new territories for which they don't have a mandate, pushing private enterprise to the sidelines.

Today (Tuesday) Mark Thompson, BBC Director-General, is talking about the role of public service broadcasting.

Meanwhile, across the road at IFA, the European consumer electronics fair, it's very quiet - the quietest I've ever seen it since I first came to the show in the 1980s. My initial impressions are that there's a lack of anything new and exciting - but if you want to see hall after hall of plasma and LCD HD-ready TV sets, then IFA is definitely the place to come. And there are washing machines, too...

Edinburgh lacking some internationalism

I travelled to the Media Guardian Edinburgh International TV Festival this past weekend. The AIB had offered to promote the event to its worldwide readership with a print advert in 'The Channel' and online banners on the main AIB website and in the electronic news letter.

The event has been running for 30-plus years, and brings together many of the top names in UK television - both channels and production houses - for three days of debate and networking. This year was, apparently, a record one for the number of delegates, and there were international attendees from Scandinvia, Germany, Qatar and North America. But the debate was very UK-centric, with only a couple of sessions that looked outside the UK's TV industry.

I was impressed by Clay Shirky of NYU who talked about the future of TV and convergence, sharing ideas and helping to start conversations. Wadah Khanfar, DG of Al Jazeera Network, gave his views on international news. But those were really the only sessions that looked at the rest of the world. Perhaps next year there will be more of an international flavour and sharing of ideas across borders. The AIB's ready to help with this.

AIB at IBC 2008

The AIB is going to be at this year's IBC exhibition and conference taking place in Amsterdam from 12 to 15 September. We've got a stand at one of the main crossroads of the event, at the top of the escalators outside hall 11 and it's there that we'll be highlighting the AIB Knowledge Network.

Drop by and pay us a visit if you're coming to IBC this year. We'd love to have a chat and share ideas and learn about the challenges facing you in the rapidly-changing media industry. We'll also share with you the AIB Hotspots @ IBC...find out more in Amsterdam.