Martin Belam is writing a series of posts charting the history of blogging at the BBC. It’s well worth a read if you have any interest in this stuff, especially since ‘well, that’s how the BBC does/did it’ is still a powerful weapon in any workshop.
I was particularly struck by an almost throw-away line in part three: ‘ As I understand it, the way blogging out-reach is being done nowadays by the BBC in the English regions is to provide encouragement from the BBC for people to start blogging for themselves, but not to provide the platform.’
Quite right of course: and another significant victory for the upstart mentality inside the monolithic organisation. The fact is, a quick WordPress installation can do it quicker and better than any monster corporate-led project. And besides, I hear ominous things regarding the technology environment at the Beeb. Unrepeatable words have been used.
Response
The project that Martin was talking about is the BBC Manchester Blog, the proposal for which is that we’ll:
* run workshops with members of the public
* show people how to use blogging tools already provided by 3rd parties
* discuss the BBC’s editorial guidelines, in particular around what we can and can’t link to
* we add a link in our blogroll to the front page of the blogs of participants who ask to take part
* we plug their blog into an RSS reader then, as they happily create and publish content, we quote from and link back to it
Basically, we blog.
What did we find out? That doing the above takes a lot more time than we thought it would but, that said, we were received with open arms by the local blogging community. The project has gone a bit quiet recently but will ramp back up again in January as resources (Richard Fair) becomes available to do more on it.
Thanks for the mention.
Robin Hamman
BBC Blogs Network (and also at http://www.cybersoc.com)