I've to admit, I'm truly impressed with BBC's slow but steady adoption of blogging and their editors blog is a great example. Editors from across BBC have been posting on this blog for about a year now about various editorial issues, mostly on transparency and coverage, to give more depth to stories. But what impressed me most was their increasing interaction with the blogsphere responding to blogposts and even comments on other blogs. For example, many bloggers have criticized BBC's report on CIA and Vatican edits on Wikipedia, using an online tool, omitting edits originating from BBC. The Head of Interactive News responded with this post acknowledging this oversight and that he himself has edited his own wikipedia entry.
Regardless of your opinion on BBC, you've to admit that they're on the right track in adopting the latest the web has to offer and don't seem to be afraid of it.
3 comments:
"Their increasing interaction with the blogsphere responding to blogposts and even comments on other blogs"? Hardly. The moderators let through a tiny trickle of comments, weeding out things which they feel are critical of the BBC, and the posters rarely, if ever, respond directly to the comments.
I've lost count of the number of times when I've post tried to remarks on The Editors and waited and waited to see the phrase "Comments (0)" remain at the bottom of the article. It's not simply a matter of the system being slow - and my god, it is slow - it's that most of the comments never appear.
If this is accountability, it's not up to much.
Well, I agree they've their pitfalls, especially when you think of the volume they may be handling. But remember, this is new to them.
Yes, it is achingly slow and in other areas too - especially posters rarely responding to comments - a far from perfect system.
However, the claim that the moderators are "weeding out things which they feel are critical of the BBC" is clearly just untrue.
Of course the volume of critical comments will depend on the nature of the posting, but look through a selection of postings and you'll often see criticism. I can't comment on how representative they are, but on some postings a flood of overwhelmingly critical comments has been published.
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