Text on Text

Remember world teletext day is only three days away. Some people may notice that the date has changed some what since I made it up. Thats because I forgot about about it. I can't really say anything else about it. I'm going to try to include a teletext news section in every blog. I have news alerts sent to whenever teletext is mentioned in the news. Their have been alot more results than I imangined. One every other day so far. First below.

Teletext News:
The not-so-creativly named SwitchCo has been created to oversee the end of terrestial televison and therefore of the pure analouge teletext. The company Teletext( even less creativly named) are accully involved in the project. As are all the major channels in the UK as well as televison manufacturs. Apparently the current figures stand at 60% of homes with digital and 40 without. There are apparently a hardcore of digital refusniks( their words, not mine) who will never change.


It's unfortunate that so little focus will be on Teletexts demise when the last analouge signal is turned off. Even when Ceefax celebrated it's 30th birthday their where simply a couple of items near the end of the news and one page on the BBC website. Aside from it's pragmatic capabilitiys and great creative poetinal that is one of the things I love about teletext. Even in my earliest memories of teletext it seemed dated and doomed. It's been neglected by it's parents(at least in this country and many others) who have found more pleasue in launching crap TV channels(BBC, well Teletext too) or flogging the rotting carcas of the Holidays section on every medium possible. Watch out for the blimps and hyponotists next. Anyway it's the ultimate tradgy story. The once much loved and appricated service has slid into obscuity and will more likley die with a very drawn out wimper. It's the sort of gulity pleasure we get from seeing formerly all-conquoring movie stars reduced to opening supermarkets or making cameos in cartoons.

I relise that that was nore my own opinion on teletext than any kind of news but it's important to explain why I bother writing this. I hoping to make someone give their own opinion of teletext every week in a coloum like thing. Only a few of my friends have opinions about teletext though so I may have to start to harass people on the internet.

Teletext feature of the day-planet sound-350 channel four teletext
Comprehensive music news for all types of music. Their opinions section The Void is also one of the only places people discuss music intelligently. Oasis esspecially are treated with more than a few hackyned cliches while they briefly stop referring to Pete Docherty as Junkie Rocker as he has been crisented by the press. And sometimes kings of bland Thom York and Matt Bleamlly are not treated as the saviours of something or other.

New teletext section C4 text service. Motering as you may have guessed from the title. Offers lots of dealer information, used cars for sale and motering news in genrel. Looks pretty good. Also their is now a new highest page in British teletext (if you exclude 888 for subtitles) in 798. Although it just seems to be some sort of techical jargon. I'll stick a picture up tomorrow and maybe a full review of the new section.



SUPPORT WORLD TELETEXT DAY APRIL THE 18TH!

This a picture I've been hoping to capture for a while. It seems to be a placeholder for ITV teletext pages. Scared the hell out of me when I first saw it. The little A like symbols look a bit like the aliens out of Space Invadors.

I should probably admit I made up World Teletext day. I noticed the clock had slipped past mid night and into April fools day as I browsed the blogger pages. There most definitly should be a world teletext day though I'm sure you will agree and I plan to press ahead with celebrations anyway.

Theres a few snippets of Teletext news in the UK. The pilot area for the big anolouge swich off that is due to be compleated by 2012 has had it's anolouge TV signal, and therefore it's teletext, cut. I forget the name but it's somewhere in middle england. And I'm not talking about class boundries. Though I'd suspect one of the richer areas was choosen for the scheme as it's likley to be more succesful where people can afford digital televison. The other teletext moment I noticed this week was how well it can cover the news. When the Pope died it was, rightly, pretty much the only thing in the televison news and the papers also devoted a number of pages to it as well. Ceefax covered it particully well. It could cover the story and include profiles of the pope, tributes to him etc in only around 7 or 8 pages. Because of the power of sub-pages. This means the rest of the news section can function normally. This is important. If anyone remembers the day the Queen Mother died or maybe it was the funrel, it simarley took over the news. A leaked goverment E-mail revealed plans to release some bad news/statistics on this day as no-one would notice. The sender was sacked. But would she have been if the story hadn't of been made public? I doubt it. Although Itailain Teletext did make something of an error when it claimed the Pope had fallen into a coma, this was reported worldwide of course and later dismissed as rubbish.

Another item I meant to mention a few days ago shows the BBC getting all possieive over Ceefax, their teletext service. A dutch consultant who has a fondness for Ceefax asked a friend of his in Britain to capture the pages in a PCTV card(don't ask me) and post them to a server which can then be searched in a simlar way to Google. Theres an good article on it I'll link to in the sidebar. So the Ceefax pages has become one of Hollands most visted sites and the BBC are not happy. They say it infriges on copyright. The counter-argument is that it is essentially the same as Google. It links information owned by someone else. The BBC don't lose any money so you can't really see why they care but I suppose thats their problem. I just found the web-site and it is very good. It also carries the Irish Republics main teletext service Artel. Who are much cooler about it. I don't get RTE(the station which carries Artel) so I'm very happy about it.

Teletext feature of the day-Sci-Tech news-Ceefax
Great little pages with often strange stories from the worlds of science and technology. This often spralws out into astrlogy and nature though. Stories that are important but are stuffed away because people are more interested in a 2p rise in stamps or how fat Kirstie Allie is.

18th of april. Tell the world. This is accully an established day set up many years ago to get people into teletext when it was a brave new thing. It's slipped away recently behind national reading day and and anti-poverty year. But teletext involves reading and the cynics always say only the poor and old read teletext. And I'm sure theres a national old person day somewhere. I ask you to write to any teletext fourom and inform them of this day. I only learned from a website which wasn't accully about teletext. It was some music thing talking about some of the odder things of the seventies and eighties, national(Okay I added the world bit) teletext day being one of them. I'm afriad I didn't take the site adress but I clearly remember the date. In fact I wrote it down somehwhere but to my surprise remembered it.

Thats all for today. My next post will probably be another guest nation, maybe Poland.