A Paean For 18 Doughty Street
[Update: A note to this post:
1 - My quote from Feral Pigeon states that "Iain Dale told us it was going to get bigger and better". Indeed he did, but note that Iain left 18DS before the 'successor' to 18DS was conceived in the form that launched in Spring 2008.
2 - I would love to be posting extracts from the video archive, but I have not been able to find a way to persuade blip.tv to work easily with the new theme I am using for the "Magazine" style frontpage of the blog. Therefore this is on hold.]
The site for the 18 Doughty Street online TV station is off the internet. I had expected the site to be preserved as an archive, but as the Feral Pigeonnotes:
Am I the only one to notice that 18 Doughty Street has totally disappeared? Iain Dale told us it was going to get bigger and better. They even had a wordy statement on the website before it too went bye-bye.
Where did it go? I was trying to find a show from last year that talked about Recess Monkey posting prematurely on the death of Margaret Thatcher, which later turned out to be a trick played on the editor of the left-wing blog.
How can a TV station just disappear like that?
I think it’s a mistake to let the site go off the air - the archive site that was left was doing a good job in preserving access to the output of an experiment that produced some quite significant material.
To my thinking, the best material of all were the extended interviews with politicians, and some of the more idiosyncratic voices that had a real platform for the first time.
Fortunately some of the archive is preserved, so I will post a daily video from the collection until I run out of material that I think will be of continued interest. They may be in popup windows, however, as I think the videos are wider than my blog template would permit.
We’ll see.
[Edit: I have softened my comment in this post slightly - without changing my sentiment.]
Tags: feralpigeons, 18 doughty street, mike rouse[tags]feralpigeons, 18 doughty street, mike rouse[/tags]
Categories: Internet / Technical, Politics
“To my thinking, the best material of all were the extended interviews with politicians, and some of the more idiosyncratic voices that had a real platform for the first time.”
Hear, hear.
One good thing to have come out of 18DS is to show that there is interest in political discourse, at length, that is delivered by newer methods. 18DS may have done more than we realise to clear a trail for homebrew pod- and vod- casts.