BBC Blogs

Currybet has slightly pre-empted me with this blog by writing about a talk given by Six Apart at the BBC in which he gives a rare insight into what the BBC thinks of blogging.

During a brief spell working for BBCi (as it was then), I noticed that there were a lot of BBC-internal bloggers, but a distinct lack of public-facing ones. Some of the BBC’s community sites, such as collective allow for users to post blog-style diary entries, but it’s not blogging in the regular sense.

I did a big bbc.co.uk-wide search to see just what blogs the BBC were publishing. Here’s a summary of the results:

  • The Comedy Blog – Currybet spotted this one too. It’s updated regularly, and is the one of the only blogs that I found an RSS feed for. Has archives but no commenting.
  • Ouch Weblog – part of the BBC’s innovative site for disabled people. Their blog is updated regularly by Crippled Monkey, and has monthly archives, but no commenting.
  • Cult – Tamara – part of a fantasy, continuing on a cult story. Seems to be a set of static pages rather than using blog technology. Updated frequently though. No commenting.
  • Scotblog – one of the most well-known BBC blogs, published by BBC Scotland. Has been going a while, and features monthly and individual archiving, comments and an RSS feed. Impressive.
  • Games Blog – a team blog with updates on the gaming industry. Has commenting, and receives the most commenting out of any of the BBC blogs. No RSS feed.
  • Island Blogging – Currybet also picks up on this one, which is notable for the fact that it allows members of the public to be part of this blog. Full commenting, but no RSS.

As well as these, there are numerous pages which are labelled as ‘blogs’ but which are actually static pages containing what’s more of a diary, kept by a single person over a short space of time. See, for example ‘A Cricket Fan’s Blog‘ and ‘The Beijing Blog‘ and others (note use of undocumented feature). These can’t really be considered blogs, and just show the BBC up for being slightly out of touch.

Here’s hoping that the BBC can publish more and more blogs on its many sites, and wake up to benefits of publishing RSS feeds. Commenting is always going to be problematic, with most blog technologies not having moderation tools strong enough to meet the BBC’s tight standards, however this could be overcome.

Comments

  1. CorporateBloggingBlog says:
    March 6, 2005 at 1:29 pm

    Internal Blogs And Wikis At The BBC

    BBC is not only trying blogs and podcasting as tools in their core business – publishing – they’re also way ahead of most companies when it comes to internal uses of social media…

  2. Frankwatching says:
    March 6, 2005 at 3:17 pm

    VNU, SAP, Microsoft en BBC bloggen volop

    …Bij Alistair Shrimpton van Six Apart lees ik dat de Engelse omroep BBC eveneens al volop van start is gegaan met blogs. Naast blogs is de BBC ook helemaal in voor wiki’s, forums, podcasting en andere vormen van social networking…

  3. OliverG - kultur, kreativität + kommunikation says:
    April 22, 2005 at 11:00 pm

    BBC bloggt intern und ein Wiki gibt es auch

    70 Blogs mit 100 Schreibern hat die BCC, für den internen Gebrauch. Sie ergänzen ein BBS und ein ’soziales Netzwerk’, das Skills und Interessen der Mitarabeiter abbildet. Benutzt werden die Blogs in Projektgruppen…

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