BBC News website developments

I’m not sure whether it was today that it happened, but there have been some new features launched on the BBC News website recently.

On the homepage, a new section has been added at the bottom that packages together some of BBC News’s ‘products and services’, including podcasts, e-mail news, and RSS feeds. Interestingly, blogs aren’t mentioned here. Clearly blogs are thought of as online content, but podcasts are thought of as a service, perhaps because the BBC news podcasts are currently just a re-packaging of existing content, rather than a new type of content in its own right.

At the top of the page, the streaming video content is more clearly higlighted. During much of the day, it promotes a ‘news in 2 minutes’ video-on-demand package , but whilst the Ten O’Clock News is being broadcast on BBC 1, I spotted that the live video stream of this programme is promoted. Clever stuff.

Looking at the RSS feeds, I note that the old orange ‘RSS’ icon (), which the BBC News site was using, and is still currently used on the BBC homepage, has been replaced by the new ‘feed icon’ used in Firefox, the new Internet Explorer, and being promoted as a new ‘standard’ feed icon. Whilst an orange version is used on the RSS feeds page, a custom red version is embedded within the ‘news feeds’ graphic on the homepage. It looks good, and it’s nice to see the BBC (which sees part of its role as being to introduce new users to the internet) promoting this ‘standard’ icon.

Finally, as described on their RSS feeds page, the BBC News website now allows you to convert BBC News searches into custom RSS feeds. This is a significant, as an ‘unofficial’ service which did this – mentioned by Blackbeltjones – but condemned by the BBC as potentially causing them technical problems. They obviously saw that the service was in demand, and have developed the service accordingly. And so they should.