Should BBCi News Accept Pings?

I’ve recently learnt all about ‘pinging’ - the blogging tool that lets you let other blogs know when you make a post about them. This has got me wondering, wouldn’t it be good if BBCi News accepted pings? As the most popular online news site in Europe (if not the world), their news stories are frequently referenced in blogs. By accepting pings, and listing them in a ‘trackback’ popup, you’d be able to see what the blogging community has to say about the article.

It would be a bit of leap for the BBC, as they’d be providing a lot more external links, some to sites which may be strongly opinionated or contain incorrect factual information, but if the feature was contextualised in a way so as to make people aware of this I wouldn’t see a problem. Of course, there’s a resource issues, as it’s bound to be abused by spammers, so the BBC would probably have to pre-moderate it, with some cost implications for this. However, I think it might be worth it.

It might be a while before the BBC takes on this idea though, so I thought in the meantime, some external site could provide this service. All it would require is a script that takes the BBC News RSS feeds, input the URLs into some database, allow people to ping these URLs, and then display a list of links for each headline. Anyone want to take up the challenge?

« The Needles @ Camden Barfly| BBC Online Community Service? »