Working at the BBC

From 2000 to 2005 I worked in the New Media - now Future Media - department at the BBC. When I started the currybetdotnet blog in 2002 it was natural to blog about my work at the corporation, and the first thing I posted that gained any widespread attention was "A day in the life of BBCi Search", a presentation based on an in-depth search analysis of one day's search activity across bbc.co.uk.

Other articles about the BBC's search service included "How search can help you understand your audience" from 2003, a review of the 2006 search redesign, and a 2009 series looking at the initial design, launch, and ultimate failure of the BBC's web search service.

For the best part of 2 years I was technical producer on the BBC.co.uk homepage, launching the first international version and presiding over coverage of events like Ashes celebrations, Children In Need variations, London winning the Olympics and facing suicide bombings and the consequent huge surge in web traffic the next day, and the international appeal for aid following the 2004 Asian tsunami.

As well as search and the homepage, during my time at the BBC I looked after email subscription services and online voting - overseeing the vote to name the new bridge at Wembley, Five Live's Sporting Century and the Today programme's Greatest Painting in Britain amongst others. I narrowly failed to launch a BBCi Toolbar for Internet Explorer.

Some of the most popular posts on this blog have been about the number of Linux users that the BBC homepage had, once mistakenly quoted as 600 by Ashley Highfield, and the launch of the iPlayer. You can also find posts about the tired DRM debate surrounding the iPlayer, and the oldest surviving sections of bbc.co.uk.

At the BBC I got the opportunity to go to lots of events, and I wrote about some of them here. "People Don't Like Basements But Tapes Do" is the story of a tour I took around the BBC's archive at Windmill Road, and I also went to a fantastic Q&A session with Richard Baker and Charles Wheeler to celebrate 50 years of BBC News on television.

A couple of these events had a strong focus on Doctor Who, including Julie Gardner talking about 'The Tardis and Multiplatform' - Doctor Who's multi-media incarnations and a 2004 talk on The Making of Doctor Who Webcasts. I've also written about Doctor Who and the Vanishing Plaques in Television Centre, and Putting a F__k Off Dalek on the BBC Homepage.

The BBC went through a lot of upheaval during the time I was there. Greg Dyke was forced out after the Hutton Inquiry, and I subsequently saw him talk through his memoirs at the Royal Festival Hall. I was there during the public Charter renewal process, and for the publication of the Graf report which curtailed several areas of the BBC's online activities. After I left, the BBC Trust abolished the BBC Governors (along with their URLs) and BBC Jam was closed after the money had already been spent. But some pressures on the BBC never seem to change - in 2003 I was blogging about whether the Tories would close the BBC website and whether the cash raised by selling off access to the BBC's archive would prevent free access for all.

You can also read a series of guest blog posts I wrote for the BBC Internet blog at the end of 2007, as part of the celebrations of ten years of the BBC website. A Brief History Of Time (Travel) covered changes in the way Doctor Who was covered on the web, whilst there was a two-part series on Developing Search at the BBC. The BBC's Homepage On July 7th 2005 looked at how the London tube suicide bombings were covered, Remembering myBBC examined early BBC experiments with personalisation, and Mind The Gaps discussed the bits missing from the archive of the BBC's early web presence. There were also pieces on new media interactivity changing the relationship the BBC has with its audience, and "Herding Digital Cats" - a two part article about the information architecture of the BBC Online. The full set can be downloaded in print format as a single PDF document.