I admit to being rather underwhelmed at the first glance of the new BBC blogs portal. It seemed an odd thing to do, really – combining blog posts from disparate parts of the sprawling BBC network and then put them into one place when all they have in common is that they’re, well, blogs. Who cares?
But that was before I spent some time digesting the welcome message to the portal:
Welcome to the new home for all of the BBC’s weblogs. Although we have had blogs for a number of years, most notably our Scottish community site; Island Blogging and the excellent Ouch, this is the first attempt at bringing you a complete list, some news of new launches by journalists, DJs, and radio shows, as well as links and tips to help you find your way around.
That said we appreciate we still have a lot to do which is why we’re grateful for your feedback. We’re already collating comments on all of our existing blogs, scouring bloglines, technorati, google blog search and the like. So we’ll spot if you are talking about Nick Robinson, Paul Mason or Peter van Dyk on your own blogs. But you can also email us about what we’re getting wrong (or hopefully right).
Our biggest challenge over the next few months will be to reflect and engage with the millions of you who are already having conversations about the BBC online, about the stories and issues we cover. This site is a really small step. It’s only a list after all. More to come.
So it begins to look a little more like an exercise in organisation – a step towards something much more ambitious, which will reflect the breadth of commentary on BBC content out there in the world. If that’s the ambition, it’s very exciting (if somewhat scary, in the same way that starting to open up BBC message boards was scary). Good luck to them (oh, and use Yahoo! blog search, chaps, it’s better than the Google version).
Less a conscious ‘portal’ strategy, and more a case of ‘we have to put something up at the root URL, don’t we?’, surely? Plus I suppose, at least an automated RSS consumption script gives a hint of fresh content within, rather than just a static list of links.
You’re both right. We *did* need to do something with the root URL and we’ve effectively just used it for a list and rather a disparate one at that. (as well as a bit of feed aggregation.
I agree there’s not a lot in common for users with Annie Mac and Nick Robinson (apart from their id cards)
As for our future plans then I’ll leave that to my boss; Ashley Highfield who in last weeks New Media Age outlined some rather bold vision stuff.
Of course we look at yahoo blog search too (but only when technorati times out đŸ˜‰
Jem (from bbc.co.uk)