Recent posts in my BBC Category

The first of what will no doubt be a flurry of blog posts about my trip to a datajournalism meetup in Berlin looks at one of the questions asked during the final panel session: Why do the UK and US seem to be so more advanced with linked data and the semantic web than Germany?

A special edition of the linklog, with a list of things that I mentioned in a talk about datajournalism at The Guardian & The Observer which I gave at the 1st Datajournalism Meetup in Berlin in September 2010.

There has been a flurry of publicity recently around the BBC Archive, and so it seemed churlish not to plug my own archive material from 2005 on the topic - "People Don't Like Basements But Tapes Do" - A Tour of the BBC Film Archive at Windmill Road

Today I wanted to draw to a close an unexpectedly lengthy set of blog posts triggered by Patrick Smith's "Link to the past: why do some news sites STILL not link out in 2010?" with a look at a couple of ways that BBC News has used external links in the past.

With all the talk over the last couple of weeks about news sites and external links, it seemed appropriate that the BBC should come out and make yet another promise to drastically increase the amount of traffic bbc.co.uk is sending downstream. Erik Huggers' commitment follows the pattern laid out by the BBC Trust in 2008, and by the Graf review before it.

Given that Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes was a regular reader of The Times, it was perhaps no surprise that the news website that the 21st century BBC Sherlock was using looked more than a little familiar.

The BBC's new series 'Sherlock' has some interesting online activity associated with it, as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson have not just arrived on screen in the 21st century, they have 21st century websites too.

Without wanting to become a single subject blog this week, I wanted to return to the topic of the BBC Trust decision not to carry out a full Public Value Test into the BBC's entry into the smartphone apps market. One thing I will give the Trust praise for is, that like the Governors before them, they make their research documents public. I've had a little time to study the report they commissioned from Mediatique, and I wanted to pick up on a few points it contained.

BBC Breakfast gave me a laugh out loud moment this morning, when as part of a package about 'cyber-crime', they had an Executive Director from the Open University typing in everybody's first BASIC program into a vintage computer.

Last week the BBC Trust gave permission for the BBC to launch applications into the iTunes store. As someone who has worked on The Guardian's competing iPhone app, and given the fragile state of the news industry business model, I couldn't help but be disappointed that the BBC Trust did not put the proposal through a full Public Value Test.

In amongst the criticisms of the new BBC News website, there are several people suggesting that the new design is tempting them to start buying a physical newspaper again. Could the BBC News redesign be the saviour of newspapers?

Watching feedback to today's redesign of the BBC News website is another example of how the real-time web is speeding up and changing the product development lifecycle.

When suicide bombers attacked the London Underground 5 years ago, I was in charge of the technical delivery of the BBC homepage. During the course of the day I kept a record of how the page was used to convey information to Londoners, setting record levels of streaming media usage in the process.

Whilst it can be a great tool for finding out information that organisations have embargoed in order to co-ordinate press launches, over-zealous 'speedy deletion' of band articles on Wikipedia is harming the linked data ecosystem.

My recent blog post about changes to the BBC's global navigation scheme has generated some interesting comments from people involved in various stages of the website's design throughout the noughties.

During the course of the election campaign I've been making a gallery of screenshots of online news coverage, with a particular focus on the design of interactive tools and maps. I've put them together into a Flickr set, and made a short video compilation of them.

After a decade experimenting with different ways of categorising BBC content on the web, it looks as if BBC Online has finally come round to what user testing was telling them all along - that news, sport, weather, TV and radio are the five main categories users expect to find on the BBC's website.

The decision of the BBC Trust to examine whether the BBC's iPhone application plans need further regulatory oversight is the right one, and the only that could have been made.

The BBC has announced it will close half of BBC Online's top level sites - but the list published yesterday has only caused confusion about what actually constitutes a top level site in the eyes of the Corporation.

For Ada Lovelace day, I've blogged about 5 women who have inspired and influenced my career in technology, and to whom I owe a huge debt of gratitude.