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The BBC has to me always been a pillar of unbiased and thorough reporting of the news, but no more. In a recent series of stories the have made the fallacious claim that they’ve captured the birth of a rhinoceros for the first time on a web cam. Well, that’s just malarkey.

Way back in August of 2000, the company I was working for at the time (now defunct) installed a web cam at the Cleveland Zoo and captured the birth of the white rhino Azizi from mother Inge and father Spike. It was a test of the software we had written to allow recording and playback of video from cameras via the web – cutting edge stuff in 2000. It certainly wasn’t of the quality of the BBC’s presentation of the event, but then again we didn’t have the resources that the BBC has nor did we have the benefit of the seven years of rapid development of web technologies that the BBC can draw upon.

Now, I’m partially amused by the fact that the BBC is touting this development as a major event, despite the fact that a dinky little company beat them to it (welcome to seven years ago, BBC!). I am also, however, a bit annoyed that repeated letters to their editors and attempts to leave comments on their site have been entirely ignored, with no updates to the articles. I’m sure they’re busy and field thousands of message a day, but I still think they have an obligation to report factually on the news. In this case it seems they’re ignoring the truth because they are the news, and that’s a bit worrying. Anyway, on to the links to the BBC, and with some luck they’ll notice my dinky little blog and note the accomplishments of a dinky little company seven years ago that really paved the way for what sites like them are accomplishing today.

UK Devon site for the rhino cam:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/devon/content/articles/2007/01/02/rhino_birth_launch_feature.shtml

BBC News site for the erroneous article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/devon/6421549.stm

Press release for the Cleveland rhino birth, which annoyingly makes no mention of our involvement:
http://www.clemetzoo.com/whats_new/rhino/1_baby.asp

P.S. If you’re bored, leave them a comment and express your outrage with me. Feel free to point them to this page: http://nule.org/wp/?p=117