ReadWriteWeb

Today, BBC.com has launched a U.S. election hub at BBC.com/USelection. It opens with an introduction to the Republican candidates along with a few topical analysis posts. It's a redirect to the BBC.co.uk topic page, so it's the same coverage that the British audience gets.

As the election gears up, the site's content will include articles, video series and interactive maps and polls. BBC.com averages 17.4 million unique visitors per month from the U.S., about a third of the site's global audience. Big news months, such as in May, when Osama bin Laden was killed, drew more than 19 million readers.

There are plenty of pronouncements about "the future of the book" when it comes to the increasing popularity of e-books and the steady release of new digital literature apps. Indeed, the ability to add video, voice-over, animation, and annotation all point to the great potential when literature becomes electronic, and in coming years we're sure to see a number of new creations that will challenge our definitions of "the book."

But the while the possibilities of electronic literature and enhanced e-books sound good in theory, often they fail to deliver in practice. There are a lot of reasons why this occurs: it can be costly to add video or animation, and the integration with the text itself isn't always seamless or sensible.

With this in mind, there are a lot of reasons to expect why an iPad version of one of the 20th century's most important poems, T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" could be a complete flop. It's "The Waste Land" after all, a 430-ish line poem that is both incredibly familiar and notoriously difficult. Indeed, Eliot himself seemed aware of the challenges in interpreting the poem as he included his own lengthy notes when the poem was published in 1922.

The BBC announced last month that it would be slashing much of its online programming due to severe budget cuts. As part of the cutbacks, it planned to axe jobs and websites. Some 172 of those websites are scheduled to not just go dormant but to actually be deleted within the coming year.

But one good online citizen - an anonymous one at that - has taken the time to spider and archive the endangered content and provide the material in a BitTorrent file (available here).

The BBC has clarified its plans for the release of its Android and iPad-compatible versions of its popular iPlayer application - the British TV and radio service that delivers streaming content to the desktop and mobile devices - in light of a flurry of recent speculation. According to a post on the BBC.co.uk's Internet blog, the media company plans to have its new Android and iPad applications in their respective app stores by the end of this week.

There were a few caveats to the use of these new apps, however. And oddly enough, there was no mention of an iPhone application.

The BBC will broadcast an hour-long special next Tuesday called The Joy of Stats and it looks great. Hosted by Hans Rosling, Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute and Director of the Gapminder Foundation, the show will use some beautiful computer generated graphics to demonstrate the importance of data and data visualization.

The soccer World Cup has now ended, with Spain the victor. England was unceremoniously dumped out before the quarter finals - but if there was a World Cup for the Semantic Web, then the BBC may have lifted the trophy for its country. A post on the BBC Internet site explains how the BBC World Cup 2010 website used "dynamic semantic publishing" technology.

It's an impressive demonstration of how a large, mainstream website can have added meaning and structure.

The BBC is looking to encode TV listing metadata and employ a compression algorithm to circumvent piracy, ad removal and illegal copying. According to a recent blog post by the EFF's Danny O'Brien, the group wants to get mandatory DRM onto digital TV receivers via a broadcast flag. In other words, a "public service broadcaster" wants to lessen the way we consume media by forcing manufacturers to limit product playing abilities. While open source TV services like Boxee allow users to view programs over home networks regardless of the device, a broadcast flag would force all HDTV receivers to include content protection. For those of us who watch our programs online, this could pose a serious problem.

The folks at Boxee have certainly been busy. The streaming media software company celebrated a Windows release, a deal penned with Major League Baseball (complete with instant replay on games) and partnerships with Digg, Tumblr and Current TV. It was evident a year ago that this web TV company would see its share of success, but its greatest achievement is perhaps the product's ability to rally an open-source developer community. This week Boxee announced its App Challenge winners in the video, music and photo categories. Below is a brief overview of the winning 3rd party applications.

The BBC Music Beta project is an ongoing effort by the BBC to build semantically linked and annotated web pages about artists and singers whose songs are played on BBC radio stations. Within these pages, collections of data are enhanced and interconnected with semantic metadata, letting music fans explore connections between artists that they may have not known existed.