News round-up: Big Brother, big deal

It's that time of year again, already: Big Brother 6 starts tonight.

Channel 4 is launching branded mobile content for this year's spectacle, alongside 24/7 subscription access to live footage from the house. Transparent walls, heat-seeking cameras and outside showers apparently. Oh, whatever.

Expect Channel 4 to push much further into digital media services. Chairman Luke Johnson, reported in the Media Guardian this week, said it should have happened sooner. Channel 4 will launch 4Docs, a documentary channel exclusively for broadband, later this year.

Amnesty story quietly slips off Google News

• One of Wednesday's leading news stories - Amnesty calling for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp - disappeared from the Google News home page pretty sharply.

Google, I'm sure, would insist that its news page is totally automated and that no editorial staff would have shuffled the contentious story away.

Meanwhile over on Yahoo's news page, the story was languishing right at the bottom of a very long page. Despite being listed under 'most popular world news' it didn't make it to the site's world news section.

Coincidence or conspiracy? You decide...

BBC responds to government plans for the future

• Responding to the government's green paper on the future of the BBC, chairman Michael Grade told the Westminster Media Forum this week that the corporation accepts the need for greater flexibility to meet the demands of changing technology. If anything, he said, the government's proposals do not go far enough.

"Digital radio, digital satellite, HDTV, mobile platforms, podcasting, on-demand delivery via broadband - these, and no doubt many more technologies as yet unveiled – also have the potential to transform the media landscape and provide new ways to build public value."

Wikimedia in the flesh

• Wikimedia is holding its first international conference this summer in Frankfurt, Germany. Wikimania 2005 will include workshops, research presentations and no doubt plenty of navel-gazing discussion on the open publishing network.

Tagging

• Loads of information online: file and find content quicker using tags. Good AP story here that introduces the basics.

New CNET site

• CNET Networks has launched consumer technology site cnet.co.uk, its fourth UK-focused site. You might win a Blackberry if you sign up before the end of June...

Games for grown-ups

• Credit to the Times for introducing Sudoku to the UK. The number crossword puzzle has become ubiquitous in British newspapers recently and is now the tenth most searched-for entertainment and games term on the internet, according to Hitwise.

Online down under

• Worth a read: this review of what's happening in Australian online news, ten years since the industry took off in the country. News International's MD Nic Jones: "We are still too caught up publishing the same stuff on the web that is in the newspapers." He also said the internet's impact on newspaper circulation has been overstated, and that more general changes in media consumption are also responsible.

• The Wall Street Journal Online has just won two Codie awards, the enterprising Bristol branch of the NUJ has just started podcasting and it looks like BBC strikes are off next week after a night at ACAS thrashing things out.

Right. There are sunburnt people walking past the office window and I didn't have to wear a cardi today - it's officially summer. I'm off down the beach.

Comments? Email me.

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