The BBC and the Memeing of Life

We were one of the companies invited to develop technology in the BBC Innovation labs of 2007, so here we are in leafy Surrey this week contemplating memes, memetics and the BBC. Our project, in short, is to:

Capturing the Conversation

How does the BBC monitor, capture and reflect how users are engaging with our programmes, channels, actors and presenters away from the BBC? How do we represent the latest BBC related memes and reflect that zeitgeist in both our tv and radio journalism and integrate it into bbc.co.uk?

This sort of stuff is just what we started Broadsight to do, and just to think about solving it has been educational in itself - so to spend 5 days offsite to further develop and hone the technology is exciting to say the least, and our inner geeks are happy - not least because we may even possibly find a use for memetic algorithms. (Wikpedia note):

Some researchers view them as hybrid genetic algorithms or parallel genetic algorithms (GAs). If a GA is combined with some kinds of Local Search, the algorithm is termed as memetic algorithm.

And not just Local Search in our opinion......

Postscript...Matt Locke,who is running these labs, wrote a piece on it here