"People, Places, Subjects" - BBC Topic and Guardian keyword pages: Part 3

I've been writing a short series of posts looking at the similarities and contrasts between the BBC's 'Topic' aggregation pages, and the functionality of The Guardian's 'keyword index' pages. So far I've looked at their slightly different approach to classification, their output (or lack of) as RSS, and the design of the page URLs.

External links

One noticeable contrast between the two organisations is the way that they handle external links on these 'aggregator' pages. The way that the BBC links to the rest of the web was the focus of much attention in the BBC Trust review of bbc.co.uk, and Tom Loosemore recently said the BBC's record of driving traffic to external sites was 'lamentable'.

Both the BBC and The Guardian optionally include a section of off-site links - here are the ones for Italy from each.

The BBC is overtly cautious about warning people about the nature of external site. The new BBC site visual language has a very large disclaimer about 'other web sites' in the default footer.

The Topics FAQ has a section dedicated to explaining what external links actually are:

"These are links to non-BBC websites that have been chosen to complement the subjects on the Topic pages. The selection of these links adheres to our selection criteria."

This is a policy that doesn't seem to have got any more liberal as the years have gone by. I well remember a struggle to try and get the BBC homepage to link directly to the official Olympics website during the Athens games in 2004. At the time the IOC had a ridiculous terms and conditions page that claimed you needed to fax an application in writing and wait for approval before you could hyperlink to the official site. Instead of laughing at their pomposity, the BBC homepage team duly got in touch with the legal department to see what they should do...

The Guardian is considerably less fussed. The only disclaimer about external links from their keyword index pages has to be dug out from the site-wide terms & conditions linked to from the footer of the page.

"You can access other sites via links from guardian.co.uk. These sites are not under our control and we are not responsible in any way for any of their contents."

Next...

In the next part of this series I'll be looking at how the aggregation pages relate to the search functionality on the BBC site, and how The Guardian sometimes strays off-topic.

Posted by Martin Belam, July 7, 2008
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