Huge Photo of London

Interesting reportage from the programme Click!. Pity you can't embed the radio programme in the same way. Click on BBC World is a logo festival - reportages come with all the sponsors very clearly labelled. BT hats and a giant Clauss sign. Not clear to me how this sponsorship affects the editorial content. If it does then tell me. If it doesn't, then tell me too. Don't leave it so unclear.

The branding is some parts of Click remind me of the old BBC Publicity shots which implied presenters always walked around with microphones with HUGE labels on them marked BBC. Never saw one in real life - only in photos

Netherlands Innovation Contract - How on earth is this going to work?

I confess to be very concerned that the Dutch public creative sector has become so inward looking that a growing gulf is looming between ambition and reality. And that's leading to money being wasted to keep things going that are no longer needed.



One of the top teams set up by the Dutch government to investigate the future of the creative industries in the Netherlands has now announced the setting up of the Dutch Creative Industries Council.

Not sure whether CLICK will be the final choice of name, seeing as Click.nl has been the URL of a company in Rotterdam for a lot longer than the politicians have been busy with Internet innovation. Having studied the report in detail last year for a foreign client, we concluded that creative innovation in the media sector is never stimulated well by government in any shape or form. The Dutch government has not set aside anything like the funding needed to change that. Subsidies may be fine to stimulate design, fashion and architecture but not for creative storytelling. Governments everywhere make lousy media because they want to retain control - they want to shout when the audience wants to share. I do see some excellent collaborations between academic institutions like the Open University and the BBC. But there is no Dutch equivalent. I worry that the Dutch Institute for Design, Fashion and Architecture doesn't seem to think that a website targeted at China needs to be in Mandarin or that doing business in Germany might go better in German rather than English.

Let's make a note that the creative top team believe they are already well on the way to making the Netherlands the creative centre of Europe by 2020. Some of that may happen - but only if private initiatives are encouraged to think and act well beyond the borders of this small country. There needs to be a healthy dose of outside looking in combined with inside looking out. At the moment all the initiatives are local/national with the idea that if they make a website in English they are somehow international. I have seen plenty of examples where Dutch companies have adapted foreign concepts for the Dutch/NW European market. But there are all too few going in the other direction. I believe the copyright notice (2010) on the website of the Dutch Creative Industries is a worrying Freudian slip that reveals these guys think the exact opposite of creative.

Bad news. It doesn't work that way. I get the impression that FORUM in Helsinki has got it right. The UK Arts Council, on the other hand, is on the way down. So, it's curious to try and understand why setting up a government subsidized Dutch Creative Council is ever going to work. Innovation is a culture not a contract!

When Podcasts are better than the original...

This article seems to confuse production with distribution. There are some brilliant podcasts out there which are available to download individually or you can subscribe to it through iTunes as a podcast. Podcasting to me has always been about subscribing to a favorite programme and having it pushed out to you, instead of having to go somewhere to pick it up each time.

Podcasting via the Apple Platform has always been an afterthought. If you use iTunes outside the UK, then you have to make do with the archaic iTunes interface which is linked to the iTunes store in your country. So in my case, the iPad keeps bouncing between Dutch and English, booting me out of the English language podcasts I follow and sending me off to the Dutch podcasts each time I update.

The fact that you can record and mix audio on any laptop has inspired a few people to come up with very creative formats which wouldn't work on the radio because they are perceived by the radio bosses as too specialist. I'm glad that This Week in Google isn't on the radio, for instance.

I'm also starting to see examples where the podcast is becoming better than the radio programme. A good example is the radio version of Click! which used to be called Digital Planet until a few months ago. The show was recently reduced in length from 28 to 18 minutes a week as part of the cuts to BBC World Service. Those involved haven't yet got used to the new rhythm and what's we're really getting is a truncated and rather breathless version of the older programme with what sounds like rather forced link-ups with the TV show and two line promos for other science programmes on BBC World Service radio. I've stopped listening to it on air because I know that the podcast version is longer, contains more reflective and relaxed extras and can fit into a more natural listening length for a format of this type, which is about half an hour for me. Strange that the BBC spends money on putting the TV version into a useful web/Tv context, but doesn't do the same with the radio programme where they appear to have to resort to other platforms to engage with their audience. The radio webpage is the true definition of dull...