The BBC regresses almost three years

A little under three years ago, I wrote a blog post asking why some blogs on the BBC website had the full content of the post in their RSS feed while others only have a short excerpt.

It was spotted by Jem Stone who posted this comment:

All the blogs on the BBC should now be (we switched over this PM) full article feeds. Anything else we can do for you let us know!

and there was much rejoicing.

Today a whole bunch of blogs from key news correspondents changed which platform they were published on. This includes Mark Easton, Nick Robinson, Robert Peston and Rory Cellan-Jones. They do still have an RSS feed, even if it is harder to find as the tag that would tell a browser where it is is missing so you have to find it in the clutter of the header manually, but the feeds are back to only having summaries.

So for example this 1000 word post is represented in the RSS feed by just 18

A geographic divide in social care has been revealed by a BBC survey, but why does it exist?

There has already been speculation that this move has been to make life easier for those concerned, but it surely can’t have been a conscious decision to make life harder for the end users of the site?

The radio to web channel cross-promotion problem

Today a large chunk of twitter is wistfully linking to “How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet” as they mark ten years since the untimely death of Douglas Adams.

Rereading that piece for the umpteenth time something strikes me, the problem in the third paragraph about presenters and journalists reading out URLs hasn’t really gone away, it has just metamorphosed. They may have modified their tone, but how they direct people to a page is still often stilted . For the elite few it is fine, John Humphrys can easily direct listeners to “the Today website” which even has a fairly simple address bbc.co.uk/today^[1] if he feels they need reminding. For the rest it isn’t that simple, most sit under at least their station name in the hierarchy if not also under a classification like ‘features’ or ‘drama’. The really unlucky^[2] ones might only have a URL that looks like http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0105rs2 which leads to radio along the lines of this from Rufus Hound:

All of the information on today's show is available on the website www DOT bbc DOT co DOT uk FORWARD SLASH radio4extra, have a look for the picture of me, click on that

There are many downsides to this approach, firstly there isn't currently a picture of Rufus on the page he points to, you need to have clicked through to either the comedy or all programmes A-Z listings to find him. Secondly what if you are one of the 370,000 people registered as blind or partially sighted in the UK or are number in the seven or eight people who are yet to see him at a gig or on television? Admittedly when you do find the picture of him he refers to it does invariably have the title of his show next to it, but it is piling on cognitive load to a process that already screams to be made easier. I don’t want you to think I am picking on Mr Hound, I’m only using him as an example as I have just listened to the latest “What's So Funny?” podcast and the problem exists across a wide range of shows. Some programmes have found workarounds for the issue, Eddie Mair makes great use of the PM blog which has a much nicer URL bbc.co.uk/blogs/pm/ than the 'PM Home' page.

I don’t have any solutions to this issue to mind, but that doesn’t stop the problem annoying me almost as much as podcast introductions that, after pointing you at a web page, tell you not to go there until after you have listened.

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^[1]The only other programme with a similarly simple address I listen to on a regular basis is More or Less at bbc.co.uk/moreorless I can only assume they get special treatment because Tim Harford plugs Diane Coyle's books on twitter.

^[2]I do like the /programmes/ space especially the interesting aggregation stuff including the 'Buzz' side-box, but it just doesn't produce URLs that any self respecting radio presenter would want to read out on air.

The BBC is risking its reputation

The problem of contractors not buying in.

Whoever is doing social media for the Doctor Who Experience, currently running at Olympia Two, tweeted this on Saturday.

Great day at #DoctorWho Experience with our book signing and a visit from @steven_moffat
@DW_Experience

They fail to mention that they also managed to make a woman cry, several times, as they ruined a trip for her birthday.

OK that is a gross simplification, The BBC didn’t do it, nor did BBC Worldwide or indeed anyone from Olympia Two. The people that caused upset by taking disinterest and miscommunication to a stratospheric level wore the badges of Showsec and See Tickets.  I fully understand that in this modern world big organisations are supposed to concentrate on what they are good at and outsource supporting functions. However the problem arises when those functions fail, publicly, it is the name over the door that suffers when things go bad. In this case most people aren’t going to look at the contractual relationships between the various entities involved but shout from the rooftops^[1] that Doctor Who of the BBC is a meanie. The BBC has form for this, most famously when their telephone service became a national joke. It is a shame that such a well loved organisation don’t seem to have learnt the lessons of the past, as if Frank Spencer has finally found a permanent position in the commercial contracts department.

So what happened?

A group of us met up in London for a friend’s birthday and decided to go see the TARDIS. The group that got there first tried to buy tickets for a timeslot we could all make. The website says that you can buy tickets on the door, what it doesn’t say is it is cash only. You can't pay by card for something that costs £20 per person. This would seem to be due to See Tickets not having either come to an agreement with EC&O to use their payment facilities or having managed to set up functionality to do this through the many computers they were using that seemed to be connected to either the See website or back end system. After all their whole business model is selling tickets to people, you can’t expect them to be any good at it can you? So the advanced party popped off to get some cash to make up the shortfall they didn’t have immediately to hand (they almost made it, but even the hectoring from the ticket person didn’t make it magically appear). To come back and find the doors locked. It was at this point the birthday girl had a small "It's my party" moment as she was thwarted in her attempt to jump through the required hoops to buy tickets. To be fair this was probably all that the Showsec employees had to keep themselves busy, I can’t imagine it would take the whole handful of them infesting the entrance lobby to stop people nicking the phone from the reception desk even if one had to go and bounce out a 6 year old on a sugar rush.

So the advanced party gave up and retired to find some refreshment while the rest of us arrived. After restorative cups of tea etc, and with the whole gang together, we decided that as we had all schlepped out to W14 we would have another go which went a little something like this:

• Showsec employee on the door: It has sold out but try upstairs for tickets.
• Us: Sorry what? Which is it, sold out or there are tickets upstairs on the door?
• SEotD: They have told us that it is sold out
• Member of the advanced party: They said this last time, they probably mean this 30 minute slot is sold out.

• Us: Are there eight tickets for the next show, or the one after
• See Tickets employee on the Desk: Maybe I don't know
• Us: Um
• STEotD: As you didn't come back for your tickets before you will have to wait
• Us: But we couldn't get back up the door was locked
• STEotD: You should have told them you had tickets reserved
• Us: You didn't say you were reserving any tickets and there was no-one to tell, they simply weren't there
• STEotD: *shrug*

And at that point we left…

Just as our guest of honour was in tears again we got the hell out of dodge. I’ll happily admit that it is pretty much all storm in a teacup stuff. In the first place it could have been prevented by a simple “Only cash accepted at the Box Office” sign downstairs. It could have been made better with simple communication between the Box Office and Security teams about ticket availability. It would have been significantly better if the Box Office could make use of the technology available to it and had been staffed by someone who could give any pretence about caring. Instead we had to cheer up our friend and went to the Science Museum, which was fabulous as ever.

^[1]Ok, I'm not shouting from the rooftops, but blogging, but just you wait and see that will make 4 or 5 geeks that probably weren't going to go anyway slightly more annoyed at the world than they were anyway.

Media oversight from the unexpected angle.

Much has been written about how the Daily Show with Jon Stewart can often be the hardest hitting political show on the American networks despite being produced by and aired on a cable comedy channel. In terms of television output luminaries such as Marcus Brigstocke and Iain Lee & Daisy Donovan have tried to mine the vein of satirical current affairs but none of them have worried Jeremy Paxman and television satire in this country remains mostly the preserve of impressionists and panel games.

There is one area in this country in which a programme you might not expect is doing a fine job at holding people to account. More or Less goes out on Radio 4 after the World at One on a Friday lunchtime and is a co-production with the Open University. This seemingly unassuming half hour of statistics can be (glibly) described as doing for numbers what Ben Goldacre does for medicine. While not the first important figure they have picked apart (there is a very good piece about how many CCTV cameras there are in the UK for example) they hit the geek headlines over the weekend over "7m illegal file sharers". After first finding out that the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property was quoting a figure that came out of unpublished research commissioned for the BPI which had been laundered through another report from the same research outfit via UCL they then examined the methodology and numbers from which it was derived which brought both the small sample size and seemingly overstated overall population figure under scrutiny.

The programme is also blessed in that it has its archive online going back to 2003 so the good work can be cited.

Nick Robinson reporting Brown created global economic crisis.

According to this mornings blog post by Nick:

Gordon Brown has re-written the textbooks for leaders in crisis. It was never before thought helpful for leaders in trouble to organise a global economic crisis.

So more and more of the mainstream media are taking the line that this is all Gordon Brown's fault, good good. It is quite amazing that is worked though.

200 Hundred not out.

Slightly strange fruit for this the 200th post to the blog.

1. I am now the top hit on Google for "cindy mccain scientology" mostly through a coincidence, while I have written a post on the media coverage of the Anonymous protests against Scientology the 'Cindy McCain' part came from the blog-roll down the right hand side.
2. Remember my open letter to the BBC. Well it happened, It is nice to know that they are listening.
3. Me and some friends did ingenious things with wood and screws yesterday building the set for "The Rover" I'll post more about them next week, so not to spoil the surprise for any of you coming to see the play this week.

Open Letter to the BBC web team

Dear Auntie Beeb,

Can you please explain why some blogs on the bbc.co.uk website, "BBC Internet Blog" for example have the full content of the post in their RSS feed while others, e.g. "The Editors" only have a short excerpt.

I understand the use of summarising fragments by commercial websites that need you to come to the site itself in order to show you adverts in order to generate income, but I wouldn't have thought getting people to view the original HTML copy would have been a big priority for the BBC.
I find full content feeds much more useful especially when catching up with feeds on other devices on the move. Mobile browsing has vastly improved and where I am required to click through in most cases I can do so to read the whole content, but I would rather remain within my feed aggregating application.

I am a big fan of bbc.co.uk and find the blog network most illuminating, would you consider looking into providing the entirety of this content in full RSS feeds?

Tony Kennick

The above is an expanded version of a comment I put through the feedback system on the BBC website.

You can set your watch by it

The rules are:

1. BBC announces new way of getting their content
2. Within hours someone complains

This time it is the putting of content onto iTunes, Iain is saying that the BBC are making him pay twice.

Perhaps someone from the BBC could get in touch to explain why licence fee payers are now expected to pay £1.89 to watch a programme they have already paid for through the licence fee

While this is technically true, it isn't new and it isn't a rip off, the BBC have been selling on their content after free transmission for years, I would estimate that the biggest single supplier of DVDs to my collection is the BBC. Aunty gives everyone in the UK an opportunity to watch a programme on the television, usually several times, then you get 7 days more to watch it on iPlayer or your rich content providers "listen again" service (Virgin Media's has a slight annoyance, I don't get the whole 7 days to watch a programme as the clear the previous weeks content from a day at midnight) and these days you then probably get repeats on one of the many cable channels. If after all that you still haven't seen it but you want to you go and buy it. What the iTunes move is trying to do is make that last bit easier, not impinge on all the other ways you can get the content that have been paid for by the licence fee, in fact it is trying to make it easier for a specific group of people, those that don't buy the DVDs (and thus pay for more BBC programmes to be made) but go hunting for video captured copies of the content to download of the internet. What the BBC are hoping is that enough of these people will think it is easier to pay the money than spend the time trawling for downloads to make the whole project worthwhile. It would be interesting to know how much of the technology to get this done was already there in the iPlayer backend that cost most of the money that people were complaining that the BBC spent on the project.

Or maybe Iain is right, we have paid for this, let us ban the BBC from commercialising the content, pull the DVDs from the shelves and pull the cable channels they partner in. Of course shutting down the commercial arm of the BBC would mean the licence fee having to be raised by about 20% but that has to be worth it if we have already paid?

Becky Hogge interviewed for Groklaw

Groklaw, which started as really just another blog before it's author, PJ, made it the commentary site for legal issues in the free software world and has for a while now seen it expanding the topics coverage to a wider range of digital rights topics.
Today they publish an interview between Becky Hogge, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group and Sean Daly about the BBC iPlayer. It has turned out to be a very fair and balanced discussion about the issues involved. Given that it was a transatlantic conversation there are one or two culture translation gems, this being my favourite:

Becky Hogge: ... flagship programs, like Top Gear -- do you know Top Gear?
Sean Daly: Yes, I saw a guy who like drove his car across a lake one time.

Other arts on TV

In a debate about the cultural effect of Channel 4 launching 25 years ago on Thinking aloud an interesting tangent appeared. One of the guests right at the end of the segment said that public service arts broadcasting (in his context, Channel 4 and BBC 2)had lost us years of important culture by not having televised and therefore recorded enough live theatre over the last few decades.
I'm unsure about this, I find televised theatre quite flat compared with live or even theatre in a studio for television, and are things better with more channels covering arts, anyway this is to ask your opinions.

The only went and did it

It has been threatened for a long time, but when I got home last night after a wearing technical rehearsal I sat down and found that it had indeed happened.
No I am not talking about the LibDems pushing Ming onto his own sword, to be honest they never should have elected him leader in the first place. But I am talking about UKTV G2 being re-branded as "Dave" which I object to on three grounds.
The first is taste, this is an exercise in the purest puerility, the press release text^[1] is a textbook example of facile rubbish and will probably end up on the syllabus of the Chartered Institute of Marketing.
The second is financial, I am willing to be proved wrong on this and I am not a professional media analyst but this does seam to be great expense for little gain,I can't see the target audience change dramatically, the programme mix hasn't, so I can't see the revenue increasing. The channel is available now on freeview, so providing an extra section of the market to advertisers, but that could have been done without the expense of re-branding. Don't forget that UKTV is part owned by BBC Worldwide which has a remit to maximise revenue from the BBC's IP will this investment be shown to provide returns?
The last is political, I know it is fashionable to "appropriate" from the Conservative party at the moment, but while Labour are just stealing policies, this is a wholesale lifting of the marketing strategy for the Tory leader, they might as well have called it Cameron TV. I suppose it is just as well that they didn't spend a lot of money calling it Ming.

^[1]presented from the google cache as that page has changed now on the live web site

Blogs and the traditional Media

Great swathes of the more traditional media are now sitting up and paying attention to bloggers. First of all we would get one or two mentions in the IT sections of news papers, but now there is a full dialogue with even the most traditional sections of papers and in the broadcast media. The Guardian has Comment is Free an expansion of their comment pages into a blog style section of their internet but it took the BBC to bring the process full circle.
Up to now the BBC has had one of the biggest feedback systems, answering criticisms of programmes and the corporation itself with blog posts by editors, and in-line with comments on blogs posts on its own site. One of the leaders in this has been the PM blog which even has a "glass box" thread for each day's programme for discussion and comment. This gets read and responded to by the editorial and presenting teams and is a distinct step up from reading comments from the blog out amongst the letters and phone calls on the programme. So it comes as no surprise that this is the team that is going forward with a new idea providing a broadcast and podcast "blog prog" with an agenda steered by the items that are currently top of the list of discussions by bloggers.
It will be interesting to see what the scope of the new programme will be, will they get meta enough to include coverage of stories such as the current spat between Iain Dale and Helen Boaden. I certainly expect to see more of my extended network being name checked as this goes on, given that even those of my friends who don't consider themselves bloggers have had occasionally had items from their online journals referred to by old media commentators rounding up feedback on a story or issue.

Hours of news

While looking for something completely different I found this:

BBC One	2508
BBC Two	673
BBC Three	114
BBC Four	8
BBC News 24	8468
BBC Parliament	8760
Radio 1	304
Radio 2	476
Radio 3	75
Radio 4	2374
Five Live	6549
IXtra	306
6 Music	325
Asian Network	124

It is the total hours of news and weather on network TV and radio for 2005/2006. A couple of things caught my eye, that BBC One has more coverage than Radio 4 and that News 24 can't manage 24/7/365 but BBC Parliament can...

British Broadcasting Corporation

A few interesting things are emerging from the current set of attacks on the BBC.
First and most obviously the shear gall of the newspapers will never reach a limit, the specific catalysts this time round are misleading people, with bad editing of footage and phone-ins. If I had all day I could sit here and list for each newspaper the various episodes where they have done similar, with dodgy diaries, faked photos, crooked competitions, various vexatious vouchers etc, leaving just the Lanark and Carluke Advertiser with its unblemished record to report on the matter. But know even the blackest fingered of papers is sticking the boot in, most of them with a vicious zeal.
Secondly we have the usual round of politicians and political commentators using this as a platform to have a go at the licence fee, generally adding that the Beeb has it coming as it is biased against their side. If this is the case then the BBC must politically stand alone as to be against all of the major and most of the minor parties in this country is a huge feat. I suspect that the one or two smaller local parties that aren't complaining are run by people who wont have one of those televisions in the house, but where part of the Radio Three backlash or recent times.
The last group I have some sympathies with, those that believe the licence fee is a regressive tax, but I feel that it gives the BBC an invaluable editorial independence that would be difficult to provide any other way. I have no solution as to how to make the licence fee fairer (apart from larger discounts for the blind). One suggestion has been licensing by the set which would be difficult to police and probably still hits the poorer harder.
All I am going to say before tuning in the wireless to see what is on the Home Service is God bless Aunty and all who broadcast on her.