Voice to Text; Interactive Programming; Users Steering Editorial

A few things I found in the newspaper at the weekend:

Spinvox, which the Observer says is "the World’s first voicemail-to-text service", is offering free trials of their service: http://www.spinvox.com

Roger Mosey, head of BBC Television News, reviewed Peter Bazalgette’s "Billion Dollar Game" in the Guardian’s Review on Saturday. Bazalgette, the man behind the British version of Big Brother, claims that the programme is "the most perfectly converged piece of entertainment ever conceived". In Mosey’s opinion, the book "gives the clearest account yet of the way the media revolution has changed content as well as format" and covers the internet, interactive television, premium rate phone lines and other technologies used by Big Brother, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, Survivor, etc.

In Sunday’s (22 May pg. 6) Observer) I read that the Chicago Tribune is getting internet users involved in their editorial process by using "300 online panelists… available to pass and fail headlines, photographs and layouts before they get near to a press." The unnamed manager of the project is quoted as saying: "think of it as a 24-7 focus group on steroids."