Raising The Social Bar
I gave a presentation on this project at the recent BarCampLondon3. More thoughts and further thinking is below.
What is it?
The
Social Bar is the name for a small R&D project that I have been
doing at the office. The area of research is in comments, especially on
the BBC's website but also how they work on large media type sites in
general.
Where
does the conversation take place. In recent years the BBC as well as a
number of other large media sites have started to open up, to allow
people to comment on parts of the site, started weblogs that reside on
bbc.co.uk and are written by staff and talent.
The
Social Bar is about the idea that this mechanism is not serving the
licence fee payer well enough, that we need to take a lead in the next
step to, almost step back, to what the web was about.
At
its most basic it is about creating a barrier to entry, if you want to
comment about something on the BBC's website then you have to go
through some processes that recently were not there. I know that this
sounds wrong, especially in terms of the BBC and access for licence fee
payers but there is a reason for this.
In fact these reasons can be summed up as follows:
- A lot of comments on many sites are trivial. They do not add any real value to the content that is there (be it a weblog post, a news article or some other piece of editorial content on the BBC's website).
- For all the BBC's will to be creating a space where people can say what they like it in fact can not do this. Policy gets in the way, even marketing can get in the way. What appears under the URL www.bbc.co.uk has to fit in with certain guidelines and perceptive needs.
- The BBC is supposed to be your (the licence fee payers) trusted guide and gateway to the internet. What service can achieve that whilst trapping your thoughts on its own site?
All
of this started to come together when I was given a bit of time to do
some R&D in the office. I have been thinking about comments,
attribution, ownership and reputation for a while and took this
opportunity to try and shape some project. Initially a number of
technical proposals started to take shape (I will share these online
soon, more in support of this idea rather then as actual proposals to
build stuff). What I started to find was that it really is not a
technical problem and as such does not need a technical solution.
It
is a cultural change and one that has to happen at the BBC. It is not
the audience doing anything wrong (in fact there is no right or wrong
about any of this, just that I believe that we need to move on from the
current model quickly).
So what needs to change and why exactly?
Think
about the interactions with content on the BBC's site (I am going to
assume that we are just talking about the BBC's website but this could
apply to any large site, especially media sites).
You can get in touch. Yes you can its on each of the pages on bbc.co.uk as it is part of the main page templates.
Now if you look at some parts of the BBC you will also be able to bookmark the page using services such as del.icio.us, reddit and digg. Via these tools you can also apply some tags to the content.
Some
pages also allow you to leave comments. These include the blogs (go to
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/) as well as other parts of the site. This
is on a site by site basis, for example The One Show asks for your
comments, but Doctor Who does not.
How
these comments work also differs across sites. There is moderation
everywhere, some of the weblogs allow for post moderation of comments
but otherwise everything is moderated before it is posted to the live
website.
The
One Show for example has what it called 'Curated Comments' these are
heavily moderated, as many of the news comments are as well. That is
appropriate, the BBC is well known for its editorial standards.
Applying these standards to comments in much the same way as letters to
the editor of a paper are handled and published should be acceptable in
terms of the BBC's web site.
So
we have Contact, Tag and Comment. Ideally it would be great if you
could Annotate as well but this seems a long time in coming so we will
forget about that for the moment.
Now
my contention has been that if you looked at a lot of the comments that
appear on these sites they are trivial, in fact they would probably be
better classified as Contact, in as much as it is the commentator
wanting to get in touch with the author. To be sure there are some
comments that are very good but if you looked at the cost per comment
that was editorially worthwhile it would in fact look like a rather
expensive way to get content onto the web.
So
how about we make a few changes. First off, if you want to get in
touch, then use that contact link. In fact make it more promanent and
make sure that the comments get through to the correct editorial team
quickly. Then make sure that team take time to respond to these
contacts where appropriate.
Tags,
well they are useful and it would be even more useful to get these tags
on the page, a box showing how this page has been tagged by both the
BBC (as an 'official taxonomy') and the audience (as the folksonomy).
Comments,
here it would be good to have something consistent across the whole of
the BBC and when you press on it, here is where I want us to do
something different.
If
you want to comment we should be encouraging you to do so but to do so
from your own space on the web. In fact this space could as well be
your Facebook profile page, your MySpace site or a weblog. It might
even be a comment on some other forum or space which the person is a
member of what is happening is:
- They are being asked to create a space, an identity online. Attached to this identity will be their comments on the BBC comment.
- Link to what they want to comment about. Something that we are loosing with all these facilities to comment right there on the page is the fact that the web was built to link. We should be linking to pages. It is how the web is supposed to work, it is how search engines work.
The
BBC should be encouraging this kind of behaviour. In fact what the BBC
should be doing is asking people to get involved in the conversation
and guide them to the places to have these kinds of discussions. Some
will be forums, others will be discussions that take place across the
blogosphere on different peoples weblogs. Some parts will be posts,
others in the comments there.
We
(the BBC) can guide people, we can suggest some good places to start
and forewarn and forearm them about the facts of moving beyond
bbc.co.uk. We could even have online courses similar to WebWise and
Computer Tutor on how to start creating your space. Setting up a weblog
and writing posts (this could tie in with other campaigns, literacy for
example), using the likes of flickr, MySpace and Facebook and other
such services to tool up people into living part of their lives online.
What
we also need is for members of the BBC to feel that they can take part
in the conversation that happens 'out there'. They should feel that
they can post on another weblog or forum, link where appropriate and
generally post whilst representing the BBC. We can then say to our
audience that we will be taking part in the conversation about our
editorial content (the core of what the BBC does) and we will take part
in places away from home, not on our turf.
As I mentioned before, this started as a technical project and has changed to one of wanting to change how we work on the web at the moment. There are technical things that can be built, most of them not too complex, aggregators and more tools to help point people to where the conversation is happening. It may be that the money we save in moderation costs in fact goes into more editorial work guiding people and participating in the conversation but that I do not think is a bad thing.
I think this is a fairly rich topic and is not an idea that is going to change things overnight. There are probably holes in the thinking above (should we be making things harder for people to comment, can we make sure that the producers of content do get involved in the conversations, etc.).
If you can think of reasons not to do this, or to go right ahead then please do let me know. I will post more thoughts on this shortly, including some information on the technical ideas that I thought I was originally going to build, something that might be better suited to being an independant public service publisher.
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