Don’t get me wrong, I really like BBC News Online
News Online has decided to start linking to other news sites.
News Online is the most trafficked site in Europe, easily the most successful new media venture the BBC has produced, but to my mind has failed to really innovate since launch. They’ve added clutter, an RSS feed or two, but it’s still flat news articles with a few video clips, using hyperlinks only for navigation, much as CEEFAX use 3 digit numbers. News Online is exactly what I would expect as a baseline from any news site, commercial or otherwise.
News Online doesn’t engage with its users, it doesn’t provide tools that allow me, the licence payer, to slice and dice their stories, and by refusing to link from its body text, it fails to understand how hypertext works.
Also, with its conservative link policy (I can’t show you an example of the news stories where the tech described above is working, because the links get removed after 2 days, because they might break), that only connects the BBC to established brands, it snubs the wider web, the great teeming mass of creativity. Patrician is not authoritative. Aloof is not respected. Conservative and fearful is not engaging. The gap between the BBC’s utterly laudable self image and ambitions and delivery could not be any clearer than at News Online.
Finally, by not really allowing user interaction or commenting, News Online forces that debate and activity away from its site, and out onto the wild wild web.
I’ve known many people at the organisation since its very earliest days. There’s some incredible talent and ideas, and from what I hear, an equal amount of frustration at how difficult it is to get these ideas to fruition.
Finally, while its good to see that the BBC is responding to Graf and engaging more with outside partners, didn’t he precisely exclude daily updating content (p77) (warning: pdf), as the one thing that the BBC wasn’t to do deals on (presumably to encourage the BBC to engage with small players rather than simply buying feeds).
update: I’m told that the development of these links isn’t anthing to do with Graf. My apologies.
So that’s my background ramble done with, here’s the meat.
Since I attended Euro Foo Camp last month, I realised that my time at Upmystreet had turned me into too much of a manager, and that (since I have a lot of free time and not enough work) I would start writing code again. So I bought a book on php, and started to work. In the last month I’ve also been inspired by meeting Jimmy Wales of wikipedia.org which precisely illustrates how the collaborative, great unwashed web can create more value than ‘authoritative’ institutions.
My first project for 8 years aims to demonstrate a tiny fraction of what a more open News Online could be.
It’s a proxy for the site, that does the following things:
- retrieves a page from News Online, and regexes out “Capitalised Phrases” and acronyms. It then tests these against a database of wikipedia topic titles. If the phrase is a topic in wikipedia, then it’s turned into a hyperlink
- uses the technorati API to add a sidebar of links to blogs referencing the story. Now you can see who’s talking about the story from the story itself
- as a bonus, my code breaks that bloody awful ticker. I’m not fixing it.
- because that’s how links should be, my links are underlined.
- reduces page bloat by about 10% by stripping acres of whitespace.
No doubt, I’m breaking all kinds of copyright and being incredibly naughty doing this, but it’s just a toy, and if they really want to sue a licence fee payer, well, I guess I’ll just have to take it down.
(good example of it in action:
Creepy man wants to lead bunch of nutters)
Source is here
Comments and criticisms, especially on my ropey code, happily received.
work offers even more so.
Next up: trie-based mozilla plugin to wikipediarise THE WHOLE WEB