Puffbox

I’m indebted to Martin Stabe (and indeed, Matt Mullenweg) for spotting that the Black Country Express and Star website is built in WordPress. Further evidence, if it were needed (and I’m not sure it were), that there’s very little you can’t do with WordPress. I’d be interested in a write-up of the plugins and hacks they’ve implemented to get it looking so newspaper-y, if anyone’s reading this…

Rather than me retelling the story of how Newsnight is inviting its hardcore viewers (ie those signed up to its daily email) to affect the running order, here’s Jem Stone’s writeup and the show’s editor, Peter Barron’s explanation. I’m especially interested by Peter’s line:

Another concern is that we’re going to start reading out viewer e-mails on the programme. Don’t worry – we aren’t. Your e-mails are simply instant audience research.

The Newsnight crew have consistently shown that they really ‘get’ all this – and here’s further evidence. The fact is, nobody has yet cracked how to do readers’ emails and texts on TV. It’s not for lack of trying: but it’s painfully obvious that nobody’s yet found the formula. Five Live, meanwhile – and particularly the afternoon Drive programme – has more or less perfected how to do it on radio.

Apologies if this gets too circular, but I’m grateful to Mick Fealty for pointing to Ciarán O’Kelly‘s post re consultation and discussion. One line of thought in particular:

It may well be, for instance, that the distance that characterises interaction on the internet is actually quite a good thing in a divided society. Put simply, you can hold conversations with people you would not meet in, um, three-dimensional society, especially on sites where repeat games can encourage good behaviour. The trust can actually come from the lack of face-to-face interaction.

Sky News is going all BBC Backstage, inviting developers to do something clever with their XML feeds. The prize? – tour of the studios, meet the talent, share the £10,000 prize pot. See the Facebook group for details and feed URLs. I’m not sure whether this is an inspired piece of ‘open sourcing’, or an attempt to get some design and development work done on the cheap. Knowing Sky, possibly the latter: you wouldn’t get much built for £10k, let alone an indeterminately sized share thereof.

Inviting people to look at your feeds is a risk: even after a quick scan myself, I’ve spotted a few oddities. Why deliver the title as CDATA? Why the empty enclosure field? Why not actually enclose the story images? Why make it so horrible to hack the various URLs? (OK, I know the answer to that last one: Vignette.) Etc etc.

But it does point to one crucial fact: if you’ve got good RSS, you can virtually rebuild your entire website around it. Web services don’t necessarily have to be any more difficult.

The BBC has finally launched a ‘BBC Internet Blog‘. Even the name itself seems a bit anachronistic. But if we’re going to get ‘senior staff from BBC Future Media teams talk(ing) about issues raised by you about the technology behind bbc.co.uk, our mobile services and the BBC’s presence on the internet’, I guess it’s fair enough. I’m just wondering why they didn’t do it six months ago, before iPlayer damaged its previously bulletproof online credibility.

By launching a ‘proper’ BBC blog, they’ve taken the opposite path from Microsoft – whose internal teams are permitted, or indeed encouraged, to blog, but do so away from microsoft.com domain. (Usually on MSDN, more recently on Spaces.) Many of those likely to contribute to the BBC site – eg Nick Reynolds, the ‘editor‘ of the new blog – already have their own external blogs, where they’ve been quite happy to discuss and disclose their internal work. Would have been an ideal opportunity for a ‘virtual group blog’…

Incidentally, I’m indebted to Nick’s blog for the discovery of bbc.co.uk/programmes. A potentially staggering resource, with a page for every show broadcast on the BBC, including episode guides and broadcast times (plural), with categorisation by genre, format and tag. It definitely needs a usability lift, but if you can see the underlying potential here… er, blimey. For starters, imagine what you could do with schedules via RSS or iCal? (They’ve already got hCal support in there, if you look hard enough.)

Er… is the BBC News website really ten years old this week? I remember it evolving quite fluidly from Politics 97 – which, I’m delighted to discover, is still (largely) live on the Beeb site, as far back as The Day After Election Day 1997. Oh what a night…

Very interested to read about yesterday’s internet/politics seminar at Queens University Belfast, organised by Mick Fealty, the man behind Slugger O’Toole and more recently the Telegraph’s Brassneck. I’m particularly taken by one passage in the report by blogger Alan In Belfast:

Blog posts tend to be dominated by a single voice, a consistent set of values and personal background that command what’s written ‘above the line’ in the main post. Blogs differentiate themselves by their voice. And while there is still a melee of commenters ‘below the line’ (in popular blogs anyway), it’s centred around a sophisticated starting point in the original post. And with discipline – and an eye for libel – the commenting can be proactively gardening, pruning the straggly branches, and removing the poisonous weeds.

On reflection, this is probably the conclusion I reached myself, but never quite put into words (although I probably wouldn’t have used a gardening analogy).

Forums generally aren’t successful, in the same way decision-making by committee generally isn’t successful. The blogger sets the tone, and enforces an appropriate ‘door policy’, as is his/her right. I’d add that the blogger ought to be posting regularly, always driving things forward – which ought to stop any threads becoming too lengthy and/or circular. There are lessons here, people.

Expect similar discussion at next week’s Telegraph open night on political blogging. Hard to imagine a more illustrious guest list; if you’ve got any interest in this field, you really ought to get your name down.

This gagging order on naming the (allegedly) blackmailed Royal is making the legal system look ridiculous. In an idle moment, I did a one-word search on Google News UK. I didn’t even have to leave the first page of results to find the individual’s name: helpfully it featured in one of the extracts, along with a picture too. Which begs the question… is Google breaching the ban? They may not have written the words, but they’re certainly republishing them on their own (supposedly UK-targeted) pages.