BBC Does Blogging. Actual Blogging.

A year and a half ago, I wrote a blog entry about BBC blogs. Back then, there were just a few small blogs, and lots of things that were called ‘blogs’ but weren’t…

The situation hadn’t really changed much until today, which sees the launch of Nick Robinson’s Newslog, in time for the Conservative leadership contest announcment.

As Ben Metcalfe points out, it’s the first mainstream blog they’ve really done.

Design-wise, it looks nice. Clean. Bit of a shock to see a BBC site with no left nav though. I felt lost at first.

I’m going to complain again (coz it’s worth saying) at the RSS feed, as it doesn’t contain full posts but just a tiny extract – which I never feel is quite enough…

Interesting that it’s hosted at Six Apart rather than the BBC. Wonder why that is. BBC can’t exactly be short of server space.

Update: Hmm, the RSS feed seems to be down. Or something. There are currently 48 subscribers to the feed in Bloglines, but only the most recent entry appears (with full text). It’s all very odd. Yesterday the main RSS feed was sending out an application/xml+atom MIME type, which was causing Firefox to download the file rather than displaying it. Hopefully these are just teething problems though…

Further Update: Scratch that, the RSS feed wasn’t down, it was just Firefox downloading it silently in the background. And maybe the MIME type isn’t wrong, but I still can’t figure out how to stop Firefox or IE to display the XML.