Two websites referenced on screen, Sherlock's "Science of deduction", and the blog that Dr. Watson's therapist is encouraging him to write, both exist. There are some nice touches on the latter, notably comments left in the name of Watson's sibling Harry, who was also referenced in the show's dialogue.

This isn't a new thing for BBC dramas, they've been doing it for at least 5 years. The archives of this blog are littered with posts from 2005 as the revival of Doctor Who was supported by websites for Geocomtex, U.N.I.T., Bad Wolf and pseudo-companion Mickey.

 

It is worth bearing in mind that these off-bbc.co.uk domains are the type of things that add numbers into the long list of domain names the Corporation owns which occasionally vexes the press. And also worth remembering that they don't seem to fit in Erik Hugger's fabled 'definitive' list of BBC websites.

They also illustrate the increasingly complex issue of new media rights around television shows. The fictional blog belonging to fictional character Dr. John Watson bears actor Martin Freeman's image on something being operated by the BBC. Mary Portas, by contrast, uses her own website & Twitter to provide a live chat back channel when her Queen of Shops show is being transmitted by the BBC. Presumably both had to be negotiated up front.

I'm looking forward to the next episode - even more so since spotting the theory on the Feeling Listless blog that the title role is actually "the later cantankerous version of the Eighth Doctor finally getting a tv series albeit called something else and not played by Paul McGann but you can't have everything".

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.

The iPad question

On page 7 of the Mediatique report there is the following statement:

"There are a range of devices, including e-readers and Apple's iPad, that share many of the characteristics of smartphones, but which are outside the scope of our analysis"

This quite clearly states that Mediatique did not look at the market for iPad applications. If I was one of the people currently trying to get an iPad app subscription model to work for The Times, I would be absolutely furious that the Trust appear to have approved the entry of a specific BBC News iPad app into the iTunes store on the basis of no independent market research whatsoever.

Revenue models across different platforms

When looking at revenue models for news apps, the research produced for the Trust states:

"Revenue models vary across the spectrum of news apps, however the majority are freely available - a very recent survey undertaken by Journalism.com found that 24 of the most popular 36 news apps on Apple's App Store were free. In addition, The FT and The Wall Street Journal offer free access to those with an existing offline or online subscription; a notable exception to these trends is the Guardian, whose app is priced at £2.39 on iTunes, although the Guardian's app on Blackberry's App World is available for free."

If you are unfamiliar with the app landscape - and that is, after all, why the report was commissioned - you could be forgiven for thinking that with regard to The Guardian, Mediatique are comparing like with like.

However, the iPhone app which we charge £2.39 for is a fully functioning browse experience for guardian.co.uk content in a self-contained environment. The Blackberry offering, on the other hand, is a 'launcher app', which is little more than a glorified web bookmark with an icon.

From the way the two 'apps' are presented in this part of the study, you would be hard pushed to understand that they did not represent similar products at all, hence the difference in the pricing points.

The impact of free content

On page 32 of the Mediatique report, they state:

"Experience from the online sector confirms that consumers are typically unwilling to pay for content where there are free alternatives"

Yet the BBC's Trust announcement, says that:

"In response to industry concerns, the Trust also considered that that there would be some overlap between the BBC Apps and free Apps, but that impacts may not necessarily be large...The degree of overlap with premium or paid Apps was also expected to be lower."

That conclusion - that the BBC's impact on paid apps will be less than their impact on free apps - seems completely at odds with the research.

And finally...

At the Changing Media Summit earlier this year, Erik Huggers said:

"Apps for me are no different from a browser. They really aren't".

He's completely wrong.

iPhone apps are very different from a browser, and one of the defining things that makes them different is that they are sold in a shop. A shop which now contains a shelf of free BBC things, right next to where commercial news organisations are trying to encourage a market to develop.

Anyway, I shall leave this as my last word on the subject. As William T pointed out in an excellent comment on my last post - it is easy to come across as sounding like I have a bad case of the sour grapes. I think there are potentially lots of reasons why BBC smartphone apps are good for consumers and for the Corporation.

I just don't believe, having read the research that they based their findings on, that the BBC Trust have performed their regulatory function correctly. In the case of the BBC News iPad app in particular, it appears they reached their decision not to carry out a full Public Value Test on the basis of no independent research into the market whatsoever. That surely can't be right.

The views expressed on currybetdotnet are my own, and do not reflect the views of Guardian News and Media Limited, or any current or former employers or clients. Which, you may recall, includes the BBC, where I worked between 2000 and 2005. Read my blogging principles.

In his article, Preston argued very strongly that it doesn't matter if the subject matter and tone of newspaper websites strays from that belonging to the parent print brand.

I can't say I entirely agree with that.

Where I think the Mail Online particularly suffers is that the digital team seemingly have to publish online everything that has been prepared for the paper.

That leads to some really awkward moments online. I mentioned last week the fact that the paper was 'giving away' DAB radios next to archived articles calling them useless and describing digital switchover as a waste of time.

This week's awkward moments already include a story about Jon Venables' collection of upskirt photographs which could barely conceal the tone of disgust - next to the Mail Online's very own celebrity upskirt of Alesha Dixon.

Likewise, Alexandra Shulman wrote a piece asking "When did bikini anxiety become such a national pastime?". In isolation in print it makes a serious point about the way that women are made to worry about what they look like. Online, it is certain to appear against a constant stream of articles in the right-hand column saying that women look too thin, too curvy or too old in their bikinis.

Just as the print editors seem to be able to pick and choose which web first stories make it into the printed edition, I'm sure Martin Clarke and his team would benefit from being able to pick and choose which print commissions make it online.

It made me wonder how easily you could do the same thing with our digital output.

It is only a fragmentary glimpse though, as the pages generated by our old 'R1' CMS are framed in the global navigation generated by our 'R2' platform - albeit with some incorrect migration tagging that makes the system think World Cup 2006 belongs with the Champions League.

This is a marked contrast to how the print archive works. The print archive preserves the paper exactly as it is printed. Digital archives are rather more malleable than that. Since the introduction of CSS, the mantra of keeping presentation separate from content online means that it is possible to present 'old' content in 'new' templates.

It isn't just the content, but the advertising as well.

A print edition from 2006 carries advertisements from 2006, one from 1950 carries ads from 1950, complete with bad fashion and out-dated sales pitches. But, if you think about it, when you look at a web page from 4 years ago, you don't generally see ad inventory from 4 years ago. From a commercial point of view - having the ability to resell the same space on a page 4 years later - this is great news. From the point of view of a historian or archivist, this sucks.

As well as the front page of the special site, some of the World Cup blogs have been preserved (mostly) in their original format. Here is Richard Williams' "Zidane exits the stage with a walk of shame" article as it appeared online and in print.

And how did we forget, in the middle of all the furore this year about Paul the Psychic Octopus, that in 2006 The Guardian had Der Kaiser, the betting fish?

"Der Kaiser had the tournament of his short life to teach mankind a thing or two about the world of gambling. Starting with a kitty of £250, he made a series of inspired punts to end up with £368.83 to spend on fish flakes and one of those little treasure chests that go in aquariums. His greatest World Cup moment came when he predicted Italy and Germany would be 0-0 after 90 minutes and won himself £55."

The Guardian has digital versions of their coverage of Euro2004, the 2002 World Cup and Euro2000 preserved online.

These only give the illusion of being 'preserved' though. If you click on one of the match reports from Euro2000, for example the semi-final between hosts The Netherlands and Italy, you'll find that whilst the front page retains a look and feel from 2000, the individual articles and match reports have been migrated into the current templates.

Still, The Guardian has done better than FIFA at preserving World Cup web content. All traces of the websites that Yahoo! built for them have gone, and although it clung on until the mid-2000s, you can no longer view the USA '94 website.

You might also be interested in:
The Guardian's "Wall of World Cup Archives" - a companion blog post to this about The Guardian's print archives.
Africa in the FIFA World Cup - a 6 part history of African teams performing at World Cup Finals starting with Egypt in 1934.
A history of the online World Cup - a look at World Cup websites in the 90s and early 2000s from FIFA and the BBC