Quad Lasers

I’m really starting to love the BBC’s Backstage project; some of the prototypes that people are coming up with are really quite fantastic. Here’s a few of my favourites:

• Nick Crossland’s Missing Words
  Based on the “missing words” round from the BBC programme “Have I Got News For You”, it takes headlines from the news, blanks out a few words, then asks you to guess what those missing words might be… Hence the fairly self-explanatory title which has probably just rendered this explanation redundant. Sorry.
• Ben O’Neill’s Map of the News
  Duncan Barclay’s Local news by County
  Both of these tools combine Google Maps and the BBC’s news feeds to create (wait for it) news maps. There’s not much more to explain really.
• Rhys Jones’ Map of BBC London Jam Cams
  Another excellent little idea, which uses Gmaptrack to overlay the locations of the BBC’s traffic cameras in Central London. Clicking on one of the markers brings up the latest image from that particular location.
• Headshift.com’s Tagged BBC News
  This lets you tag news stories and view related articles that have been tagged similarly. I especially like the All Tags page, which attempts to fetch related links from Del.icio.us, Technorati, and Flickr. Unfortunately, the nature of tagging means that mischievous little scallywags can place misleading tags on articles, as seen in the Arse! category. I really hoped to see some arse when I clicked on that link; alas, I was duped.