BBC 'Popular and New' page

Martin (ex-BBC new media bod) has commented on his blog about the BBC ‘popular and new‘ page.

I only spotted this a couple of weeks ago, but it’s good to see the back of that tacky ‘new’ icon which was so completely out of style from the rest of the homepage.

When it comes to the page itself, I have to say that I did’t really ‘get’ it. When I first clicked the link I was completely thrown – expecting to simply see some popular searches, google zeitgeist style, but instead stumbling across a whole menagerie of information that’s quite difficult to take in.

Some of it just seems like promo content (BBC collective), and other bits just seem to have been randomly included simply because they’re programmatically generated (celebdaq). Whilst some of the features are nice (most e-mailed news stories), others seem a bit irrelevant.

The page aims to draw together information from a number of different BBC websites. This is a nice idea, but it ends up assuming a lot of knowledge – if you don’t know what some of these sites are I imagine it’s a bit bewildering.

The more interesting features on the page seem a bit lost here too. The ‘top 5 radio programmes’ lists don’t seem to appear anywhere on the BBC radio website, where they would probably be more relevant to the audience than isolated on this page.

Using user-driven content to promote content seems to be an enduring trend for websites though, so it’s interesting to see how the BBC are making efforts to move in this direction.