Text on Text

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.