December 2005 Archives
December 11, 2005
All good things...
And so Friday was my last day at the BBC, having spent just two weeks less than five years there. By chance when sorting through and packing up the house today I came across a newspaper clipping of the original advert I applied for at the BBC. I also found my first job specification, which listed the essential skills and experience for a Registration Co-ordinator as: High degree of computer literacy Good knowledge of the Internet and search engines in...
December 9, 2005
BBC home Archive beta
This week the BBC has made available a soft beta launch of an archive of the BBC homepage. Every five minutes the homepage is checked for changes, and if there are any they are recorded, and a snapshot of the entire page is taken. This was originally a prototype submitted to the BBC's backstage.bbc.co.uk project by the very talent Matthew Somerville. I think the original prototype is a classic example of a simple idea elegantly executed. I love the fact...
December 8, 2005
BBC Winter/Spring season launch showreels
Today I did something I've never done before at the BBC, which was to go to Television Centre for a staff screening of the show reels for the main channel season launches. Like most broadcasters, the BBC bundles up the highlights of the next few months into a seasonal show reel, which along with a press release is guaranteed to generate a few column inches of newspaper coverage. Staff can then go along to what is effectively the show'n'tell of...
Managing 'Glue' at the BBC: The 'Glue' of the future - part 5
This is page 5 of a 5 page article - 1 2 3 4 5 Download a print version of this article The 'Glue' of the future I now want to talk a bit about what I see to be the glue of the future at the BBC. I consider the things I have talked about so far, navigation, search and classification, to be the way that we currently glue together the many different parts of the BBC's output....
Managing 'Glue' at the BBC: Classification - part 4
This is page 4 of a 5 page article - 1 2 3 4 5 Download a print version of this article Classification I want to talk a little bit now about some of the classification of content that we do on the BBC site. We have a real problem, in that we want to make everything simple and easy for people to understand, but at the same time we have been charged by the government to show the...
Managing 'Glue' at the BBC: Search - part 3
This is page 3 of a 5 page article - 1 2 3 4 5 Download a print version of this article Search I want to move on to talk about search. You'll have noticed that there is a search box in the grey global navigation toolbar on bbc.co.uk, and that means that every page on the site has a search box on it, in the same place so that users know where to expect to be able to...
Managing 'Glue' at the BBC: Navigation - part 2
This is page 2 of a 5 page article - 1 2 3 4 5 Download a print version of this article Navigation The first tool we use to glue the site together is navigation. With all these different departments making different silos of content, the BBC site runs the risk of not looking coherent as a whole - of looking more like early Geocities on the web rather than one considered offering. We therefore use global navigation elements...
Managing 'Glue' at the BBC: Introducing the BBC - part 1
This is page 1 of a 5 page article - 1 2 3 4 5 Download a print version of this article This article is based on a transcript of a presentation by Martin Belam at IBERSID 2005 in Zaragoza. Introducing the BBC I wanted to start by giving a bit of context about the BBC. Everyone in the UK who owns a television has to pay a TV Licence every year, of around €180, and all of that...
“Managing ‘Glue’ at the BBC” - my presentation at IBERSID 2005
Back in November I visited Zaragoza to give a presentation as part of an English-speaking panel at the IBERSID 2005 conference entitled “Managing ‘Glue’ at the BBC”. It looked at how we use navigation, search and classification to glue together the different content components of the bbc.co.uk website. At the time I didn’t publish it on currybetdotnet as it referenced some services that were about to launch, but hadn’t yet gone live. Now that the BBC home Archive beta is...
December 7, 2005
The BBC gains an International Homepage at bbc.co.uk
Today the BBC launched an International homepage at bbc.co.uk. From the UK you can see it by selecting the international version using the (frankly non-standard behaving) radio buttons at the top of the homepage. Outside the UK you should now be seeing it by default anyway. The project to launch it has been my main body of work over the last few months - and one of those frustrating projects that I didn't feel I could write about on currybetdotnet...
Nick Robinson blogging at blogs.bbc.co.uk
This week chief BBC political correspondent Nick Robinson has started his blog. A while back then-editor Pete Clifton stopped journalists calling things "blogs" on the BBC News site unless they really were blogs. Well, Nick's newslog has all the proper hallmarks of a genuine blog. Not least of which because it is being hosted by a proper blogging company - Six Apart. This is quite new territory for the BBC, although not completely uncharted. Faced with the inability of the...
Konnie Huq's briefs in the Daily Brief
Every day at the BBC subscribers can get an email called the 'Daily Brief'. It is a great little source of information, with a simple premise of providing a snapshot of useful information about the business to any area that is likely to have to be reactive. I get it because it is useful for the homepage team. It normally carries details of any known schedule changes from the major network, or details of which shows may be moved or...
December 6, 2005
Doctor Who Cuttings Archive on 'BBC.co.uk - promoting Doctor Who 2005'
The Doctor Who Cuttings Archive is dedicated to preserving all kinds of Doctor Who related media clippings online. Last week they and the BBC branched into a new area by collaborating to present an article about the promotional coverage of Doctor Who on bbc.co.uk in the last year - "BBC.co.uk - promoting Doctor Who 2005". Eyedropper has been a prime mover in this and worked very closely with them (with the tacit approval of benevolent management at the Beeb), and...
Vote for your favourite John Lennon track using our new system
This week BBC Radio 2 have a whole host of programming dedicated to remembering John Lennon. I don't suppose the 'Motown Junk' era Manics would have approved. The nation's favourite Lennon track is being chosen via an online vote, and I'm pleased to say it is the first high-profile vote on the BBC site to be using the new Online Voting Application that my team have been developing. One of the joys of the system is that the majority of...
December 5, 2005
Persona non grata in my own office already
I got quite a shock this morning, and a little glimpse of what next week will be like when I no longer exist at the BBC. On Friday I had to move desks for the second time in five weeks. This isn't some example of hideous BBC inefficiency, although it is perhaps an example of lack of foresight on my part. We've gained a new member of my team recently, and over the weekend they moved into our little office...
December 2, 2005
Doctor Who exclusive later today?
Outpost Gallifrey are reporting that there will be a Doctor Who exclusive on the BBC site on Friday without knowing what it will be. Their story says it is the Doctor Who site which has announced it, but I can't see anything at bbc.co.uk/doctorwho. Maybe the story has been triggered by the fact that for just five minutes this evening the homepage had an animated banner promising just such a thing....
December 1, 2005
Yahoo My Web 2.0 Beta - My 6 month report
Over the last six months or so I have been playing with Yahoo!s My Web 2.0 Beta. I think it looks like potentially a very good product for getting niche communities of interest to work together collaboratively. It is also a great place for me to tag and bookmark URLs that I know I am going to need when I can't get to my own computer - particularly whilst travelling through Europe. One thing I was very impressed with was...
Flashy Strokes on the BBC homepage
This week the BBC homepage used a Flash movie in the promotional slot for the first time, to trail Radio 1's webcast of The Stroke. As usual, when making some kind of trial of a new format or new technology, we asked our audience for feedback, both via the Points of View bbc.co.uk message board, and via a special feedback form. There has been a strong feeling internally that with increasing broadband take-up similar media portal sites have been increasingly...