As it was hard to miss, Question Time on BBC1 last week was quite an event, as BNP leader Nick Griffin was on the panel.
It was very enjoyable to watch live and participate in the twitter conversation during the broadcast and the hashtag #bbcqt very quickly jumped to the top of twitter’s trending topics list. Anticipating the chatter, the guys at Tweetminster (which is a site that aims to enhance the connection between UK citizens and our politicians via twitter) set themselves up to monitor what went down.
They’ve published a blog post with some preliminary results here: How the Question Time experiment worked.
I think following this, it’s an interesting indication that ’social broadcasting’ is becoming increasingly mainstream.
It also made me wonder about how best to bring the backchannel into the living room.
Then it struck me that one really good way of doing it is via a digital photo frame that already has an accepted role in the living room, and performs a perfectly good useful function when you’re not following the backchannel.
So I did a search to see if photoframe manufacturers had cottoned on to this and found that the only one that has as far as I could tell is the Australian manufacturer Kogan, although there are two things that struck me: 1. The manufacturer doesn’t seem to have realized the potential as a) they don’t really promote its use as a backchannel and b) their twitter client looks like it’s unreadable from a distance (!); and 2. The reviewers don’t seem to have understood the value either as several of them question why you’d need twitter on a photoframe…
And so I find myself ahead of the curve as usual. I have a need for a product that doesn’t really exist!
:-)
