BBC TV series: Virtual Revolution

I’ve been watching the BBC’s series Virtual Revolution which I’ve had stored on my Sky+ recorder since it was first broadcast in Jan and Feb 2010.

It’s one of those series which was almost made for me…considering the work I do in social media, and yet I could never bring myself to sit down and watch it. So, eight months later, there I am sitting in the3 dark in my living room watching Part 1: The Great Levelling (in which “Dr Aleks Krotoski charts the extraordinary rise of blogs, wikis and YouTube”).

Aleks Krotoski is very familiar to me – I’ve been listening to her host the Guardian newspaper’s Tech Weekly podcast over the past 18 months or so. And she makes a reasonably engaging presenter.

Oh, boy! The BBC pulled out all the stops, though. I would like to know what the budget for the series was – Aleks was in USA, Europe, Africa and Asia…and that’s just the first of four parts.

She interviewed Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the World Wide Web), Vint Cerf (co-inventor of the internet), Bill Gates (founder of Microsoft), Jimmy Wales (inventor of Wikipedia), Al Gore (former US vice-president and environmental activist)…and Stephen Fry (er…).

You can catch up on the series by visiting the BBC site at www.bbc.co.uk/virtualrevolution/ .

It’s a very exciting site, because you can listen to the interviews uncut, there are transcripts of the interviews and a whole bunch of other resources. The Beeb does this kind of thing really well. Check it out!