5 posts tagged “thesocialbar”

Gavin Bell has posted the slides from his recent talk at TOC08. Some good stuff here on nurturing the online community around content that can equally apply to broadcasters such as the BBC as much as publishing houses. (Gaving used to work at the BBC, he is now at Nature).

I am obviously very interested in the perception of the BBC and its content, what it does, what it could do and what it should do (as well as all the negatives to those questions). So out of curiosity, I have a few questions below, if you would not mind answering them on your blogs (put a link back to here so we can find it) we can see if we can learn anything.

The BBC does run surveys on bbc.co.uk on occassion, and it has a whole department whose job it is is to understand the audience. I just want to see what the picture might be if we took a more grass roots approach.

If you do not want to blog the answers then you can email them to me, let me know if you mind me blogging your answers, anonymously of course.

Right, questions (and my answers). Oh yes, you always reserve the right to change your mind :), these are just a snapshot of perception today.

1. What BBC content do you watch / listen to / interact with which you feel strongly about. In fact what content do you just enjoy, passively 'consume' etc.

I watch a fair bit of TV and listen to the Radio, though mostly Radio 4 and XFM. BBC4 is my favourite idea of a channel, though how much do I get around to watching? What is interesting I guess is that of an evening I will watch stuff as it is on, its usually nothing that I am passionate about though.

Last thursday we sat down to watch 'Ashes to Ashes' as we had enjoyed 'Life On Mars' so much. Of course these things rarely live up to their expectations.

2. How much of this do you get from traditional routes (i.e. broadcast to your television, radio or recorded off air via a video / pvr) vesus other routes (BBC Listen Again, iPlayer, DVD or download via the likes of Bittorrent)? How much of this material is BBC and how much from other sources?

Well I do watch a fair bit as it is broadcast but that is more of an evening 'what is on'. BBC content wise, well I do download from an internal experimental service which means I do not use iPlayer. I use Macs at home anyway so to play back full screen I would have to run windows, streaming to a window is not really that good an experience. Even with a large pipe internet connection from Be* the streams still stop. This was a problem with Joost as well.

We have made use of Listen Again a bit, but not that much. I am more passive about radio content. If it is on then I can listen in and get into it but if I miss it then it rarely matters. On the odd occasion I have bought the CD from the BBC Shop, for say the recent Dirk Gently dramatisation.

I do by a few DVDs as well, though these have mostly been for documentary content. Coast and Planet Earth. I also bought the Planets and Space when I was doing an Open University short course on Planets.

Bittorrent I do, ahem, use but that is mostly for those shows that premiere in the States, I had watched all of Heroes before BBC2 started showing it (and therefor knew how slow the show got).

iTunes, well it has supplied me with the odd episode of South Park and I may get some Babylon 5 from it but again these are not BBC shows and here it is a trade off between waiting for the DVD's to be in a sale at the likes of HMV (in the case of Babylon 5) or not be that bothered (in the case of South Park).

As to the website, I look at the news and check schedules. I rarely go to a site to find out more about the show becuase I feel that I can get a better discussion elsewhere, which leads us onto ...

3. Where do you talk about BBC content? Online, on your blog, forums, amongst your online friends? or do you just chat about it at work, at the pub. Do you have 'water cooler moments' or do you in fact not really talk about it much?

My blog a bit a guess, with friends and at work. The old 'did you see' (we spoke a bit about 'Life On Mars'). In fact I have not had the urge to really talk about much television at all recently. Which is a pity as there is a lot out there that is worthy of discussion.

I think back to what excited me about television. I enjoyed Dr. Who, Blakes 7, in fact a whole load of TV scifi. Now I enjoy Dr. Who (the new ones) but it is not brilliant (a few episodes have been worthy of the alieness that the doctor should embody). Torchwood is just shouting and swearing and rather predictable polymorphous perversity. (Now Cronenberg on TV...). In fact Battlestar Galactica is the best scifi on TV right now.

Edge of Darkness is still a level to be attained by much TV drama. It worked on so many levels but again maybe I was just at that impressionable age at school, just reading Crisis comic, listening to The The's Infected albumn.

Adam Curtis is the most interesting person on television at the moment, and all you do is hear his voice. It is a visual radio programme.The playful nature of the mash-ups of archive footage, the thesis being conveyed all make for compelling television and something that I would want to talk about. The BBC's support for discussion on 'The Power of Nightmares' was awful though.

Oh, and my favourite TV series of all time, damn, well it is between Edge of Darkness and The Prisoner. I guess you can tell a lot about me from that.

4. If you wanted to get in touch with the people who made the content how would you go about it?

Slight unfair advantage, I could try the internal email system. Otherwise though I would try the BBC website, the contact us links do work eventually. Would I leave a comment on a page though? Depends on what I want to say I guess.

Ok my answers are fairly weak actually, humm, but what do you think?

If you can think of any other questions that should be here, that might make for useful learning on perception and thinking about what the BBC should / could do then please feel free to add them, I'll update the questions list.

I am the Technical Project Manager for the Languages site on bbc.co.uk. This is a great resource if you are interested in languages and especially if you want to start learning a new one. If you want to learn French, German, Spanish or Italian we have interactive courses to get you started. If you want you can also pick up some basic Chinese and Portuguese you can also find some starters here. 

bbclanguages

Continuing from the post on the Social Bar, I thought I would put down some details on where it comes from.

Initially I was given some time to do a bit of R&D, as a part of one of the technical teams here. I was interested in another way of dealing with comments. I wrote my initial proposal and started putting together some GreaseMonkey and Ruby prototypes as well as lots of sketches. I did eventually realise that there was not a big tech project here but a set of ideas that may or may not work. I had proposed this for Etech, but withdrew the proposal when I realised that all I was producing was in fact these ideas on how to think about comments and not anything that you could really measure.

I have been thinking about comments for a while, I built a site a while back that converted the UK Governments ID Card Consultation White Paper into a weblog, each post was a paragraph from the document and of course you could comment against each comment.

Most of the comments were not that useful and could not really inform a consultation.

More recently I am taking part in a project with the Design Against Crime initiative at Central St. Martins school of Art and Design, Bike Off is all about bike parking. The lasest research project (AHRC/EPSRC funded) is about developing standards for bike parking facilities. Part of the project is to have a public consultation on the proposed standards and we are going to evaluate a number of online and offline ways of doing this.

One of the ideas to address the comments problem was to switch off the comments. In other words we would produce a resource where it was easy to link into the document, to be able to link into the heart of the document when you wanted to write your response to the consultation. It is a model that I expect that we will still try. The point here was that you would (or at least should) get better 'comments' if in fact you did not want to host the comments but just make sure you had a good number of linkable too elements that needed commenting upon.

It would also help in moderation, as the amount of spam was huge. This though will be a problem everywhere for a long time.

The problem then becomes finding the conversation, which is not that hard now. You can google a URL, and use Technorati to find weblogs that link or use tags. So in fact building up a view of a conversation is not that hard, maybe navigating it in a meaningful way might take some practice but is definitely do-able.

So now we move onto the BBC. I worked on a project where we built some software that was probably overcomplicated for the task in hand and the comments that came in were not 'that' interesting. Or rather they probably were not worth the cost per comment (if you analyse it that way), when using a standard contact us type form on the site would have sufficed.

So how much value do most comments add to the original content? If you look across the web it just varies from site to site. Being able to comment on a friends weblog seems appropriate. The places I think it is not working is when you have comments across a site generically. The Guardians Comment Is Free is not as much of a success as I think the Guardian would have liked. Many of the BBC's weblogs though do get valuable comments.

So in fact a generalisation such as 'switch off comments' is not valid it does though push forward a number of smaller ideas.
 

• Who owns the comments?
• Where does the conversation take place?
• How do we find the conversation?

The answers are rather simple too, the author owns the comments, it takes place on the web (now the web can extend beyond the traditional web, mobile techologies, web on TV etc.) and finding the conversation, ok its not real time yet but you can find it using Google and Technorati and other similar tools.

The quickest thing that the BBC (and similar sites that produce large amounts of content that is ripe for comment) to do would in fact be to publicise tags along with the page/programme, well that and commit to a permanent URL for an asset (and that is something the BBC is working towards quickly, every programme will have a unique URL for it).

I did these two graphics a while back, they are linked too back in the posts here on nodalpoints but I will include them here again.

Graphics that just list the suggested tags for posts etc. Just like they do for conferences now, we could have them for the channels and the programmes and sites.

It makes it easier to find the posts that discuss the content.

Beyond this there could be spaces for other services that manage your comments in a stream so that you can retain more control over them, even if they are not posted on your weblog. Maybe this is some kind of Public Service Publisher service, maybe it is something that the BBC builds.

As long as organisations get involved with initiatives like Data Portability, APML etc (and they are) then all things are possible.

There will always be projects where it is totally appropriate for comments to be right there on the site, on the page but not always and I think, the BBC at least, has a duty to start encouraging people to interact with the web away from bbc.co.uk.

This is happening in many pockets at the BBC and the Social Bar is not some initiative to be taken up by the BBC or not, this is just a floating of ideas about comments and how we interact with content online. I am using the BBC as a bit of a space to try out these ideas at the moment, but my thinking (for all its flaws) is based on experience beyond this type of site.

I gave a presentation on this project at the recent BarCampLondon3. More thoughts and further thinking is below.

• 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?

BBC - Languages - Learn Spanish

BBC NEWS | World | Africa | Kenya schools open after violence

1. They are being asked to create a space, an identity online. Attached to this identity will be their comments on the BBC comment.
2. 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. 

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.