BBC 2.0 - session commentary
How the BBC is embracing the find, share and play attitudes of the Web 2.0
community
Tom Loosemore, project director of BBC 2.0, gave the second keynote speech
of the day and began by thanking the audience and JISC for the development
of JANET which had allowed him to develop his passion for the web as a
student.
Where did BBC 2.0 come from? he began by asking. Following a six-month
review in 2004 which looked at how to develop the BBC’s web sites and how
to reach the 44 million people who do not use the web, the BBC came up with
15 draft principles which provides a useful guide to web development at the
BBC.
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Build web products that meet users needs, is the first principle.
Examples include the ‘c-beebies’ web site
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The best websites do one thing really, really well. The BBC news site
attracts 5.5m users per week and answers the question – what’s going on
right now… BBC History site is less well used although it is, said Mr
Loosemore, a remarkable site
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Do not attempt to do everything yourselves… link to other high-quality
sites yourselves. The John Peel Day website brings together an enormous
number of concerts and festivals run in the late DJ’s memory and includes
photos taken by music lovers from these events and placed on the Flickr
website and tagged with the keyword ‘John Peel’.
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Fall forward fast… make many small bets. See www.open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue.
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Treat the entire web as a creative canvas… The best example of this is an
ABC programme which spent three times more on sites away from its own
Lost site than it did on the Lost site itself, including ‘Lostpedia’, and
the commissioning of a book which was available on Amazon.
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The web is a conversation… join in. Adopt a relaxed conversational tone.
Admit your mistakes.
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Any website is only as good as its worst page. Rigorous processes are
needed in developing and editing websites.
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Make sure all content can be linked to forever. Linking is what is key to
the web.
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Remember your granny won’t ever use ‘Second life’. If you focus only on
early adopters then you’re missing many potential users; too much on
everyone and you will lose the urge to develop web sites and cutting edge
services.
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Maximise routes to content. Develop as many aggregations as possible
reflecting as many people, places topics, channels, networks and time as
possible. Optimise your site to rank high on Google. BBC sites do this
extremely well.
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Consistent design and navigation needn’t mean one size fits all…
Architecture should reflect interaction.
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Accessibility is not an optional extra. www.traintimes.org.uk is the result of
a passion on the part of the developer to ensure that everyone could use
the website.
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Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes.
YouTube is an excellent example of this.
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Link to discussions on the web, don’t host them… Only host web-based
discussions where there is a clear rationale.
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Personalisation should be unobtrusive, elegant and transparent. Respect
your users’ data.
If these 15 principles need to be condensed, then five principles might
suffice. These would be:
Make websites:
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Straightforward – simple, uncomplicated
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Functional – usable and useful
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Gregarious – sociable participatory
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Open – exposed, unguarded
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Evolving – emergent, growing