On-demand service from BBC, ITV and Channel4

Broadcasters the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 have joined forces to offer a unified on-demand service. First reported five months ago in June, today more news of the on-demand joint venture code-named 'Kangaroo' was announced.

The existing VOD services iPlayer from the BBC, and ITV's video player are reported to continue on their respective channels, however Channel 4's 4oD is said to be due to be incorporated within the new service.

Pricing is reported as "all three broadcasters will be available for free download, streaming, rental and purchase via the internet, with expansion on to other platforms planned."

Sergey introduces the Android demo

Tumblelog evolvement

On April 12th 2005 the tumblelog came into existence. Jason Kottke described tumblelogs as:

"A tumblelog is a quick and dirty stream of consciousness, a bit like a remaindered links style linklog but with more than just links. They remind me of an older style of blogging, back when people did sites by hand, before Movable Type made post titles all but mandatory, blog entries turned into short magazine articles, and posts belonged to a conversation distributed throughout the entire blogosphere. Robot Wisdom and Bifurcated Rivets are two older style weblogs that feel very much like these tumblelogs with minimal commentary, little cross-blog chatter, the barest whiff of a finished published work, almost pure editing...really just a way to quickly publish the "stuff" that you run across every day on the web"

Thanks to the maestros of usability: 37signals for featuring a post on the latest version of Tumblr, one of the most effective tumblelogs.

Liberate Media PR celebrate

There was a big turn out for Liberate Media's first birthday party in Soho on Thursday night.

A smattering of technology and social networking cognoscienti from New Media Age, BBC Technology Online, Creative, Pushbutton.tv, Spannerworks, and many more raised a glass to Wendy McAuliffe and Lloyd Gofton at Liberate Media PR for their first year in business.

Journa-list, an online resource by subject and author

Thanks to Bobbie Johnson in Technology Guardian for drawing attention to Journa-list currently in beta.

It aims to be a collection of online journalism currently being written in the UK.

Search by name or topic and see cloud-style the most covered topics.

Welcome to Westmonster

Thanks to Mike Butcher at TechCrunch UK for news of a new professional blog publisher in the UK called MessyMedia formed earlier in September by Lloyd Shepherd, formerly of Guardian Unlimited and Yahoo Europe, and Andrew Levy, formerly of Yahoo Europe.

MessyMedia's first blog 'Westmonster' focusses on British politics and is described as irreverent, clued-up and scurrilous. It is edited by 'Westminster insider' Sadie Smith.

Shepherd said: “There's a yawning gap in British political coverage, between the established media, which have fallen into the “us-and-them” trap, and the partisan political blogs like Iain Dale's Diary and Guido Fawkes."

TechCrunch UK relaunch and Seedcamp winners

In November 2006 TechCrunch UK and Ireland launched with Sam Sethi as publisher and Mike Butcher as editor bringing much needed focus to the UK tech start up scene.

Just one month later Le Web 3.0 conference organised by Loic le Meur in Paris sparked off a series of 'misunderstandings' that led to Michael Arrington editor of the US parent site effectively shutting down TechCrunch UK. Much heat was generated in the blogosphere about who said what and why.

Following the suspension of TechCrunch UK, Sam Sethi and Mike Butcher worked together at Vecosys, then separated to run their own tech blogs at blognation launched 8 weeks ago (currently in 9 countries) and Mbites respectively.

So to bring things up to date it is refreshing to see Techcrunch UK up and running again with Mike Butcher once more working with Mike Arrington. The important stuff is after all spotlighting new tech in the UK rather than the individuals blogging about it.

This week Techcrunch UK covered Seedcamp and focused on the 6 winners that each received €50k of funding :
First up is Project Playfair, a Scottish project still in development described as "hypertext for numbers";
next is Zemanta, a 'content intelligence platform' from Slovenia;
Kublax is a hyper-encrypted personal finance application syncing all your bank accounts and utilities in one user-friendly place;
Swedish Tablefinder is an online restaurant searching and booking service;
UK-based Buildersite is a trusted marketplace for construction services based on 5% of the project fee;
Lastly is rentmeonline which has been described an eBay for renters.

If anyone has inside info, or experience of using the applications mentioned here share your thoughts on them below.