³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ

Erik Huggers' post revealing 400 top level ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ directories on Monday got reactions from and . And :

The list only seems to confirm the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ continuing to commit one of the cardinal sins of IA - having a navigation and URL structure that is all about a representation of the internal organisation structure, and nothing about ease of use and transparency for the audience.

Martin also quotes Tom Loosemore's about the number of . In comments Roo Reynolds (of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Vision) :

it's worth looking at the trend in the past two-and-a-quarter years: 138 launches in 2008, 93 in 2009 and just 11 so far this year. Also, following the strategy of "every television programme will have its own website" and many of them being automatic, Vision's "site launches" include things like /larkrise, /desperateromantics, /silentwitness, /restaurant and /whodoyouthinkyouare, all of which are redirects to /programmes.

Following the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Trust's decision to at ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ mobile apps,

So in the near future we should be able to build web apps every bit as good as mobile apps? Yes, but I would go further: for most of the things the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ wants to do, the technology is already good enough.

is the headline in paidContent. Just in case you missed it Anthony Rose will be

According to Digital Spy the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ is, and will

Slashdot the recent ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer content protection argy bargy.

Other good comments you may have missed:

Antony Sullivan answers questions on phasing out the low graphics version of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News site.

Over on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ R&D blog the Mythology Engine is going down a storm.

And finally the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ blogs home page has had a small makeover...

Nick Reynolds is Social Media Executive, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online

Ed's note: There's a new post at the R&D blog about a prototype they've built that re-presents TV dramas on the web in a very user-orientated way. It uses Doctor Who and EastEnders and there's a video demo. It's exciting stuff. (PM)

The R&D Prototyping team has recently built an internal prototype for ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Vision called the Mythology Engine. It's a proof-of-concept for a website that represents ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ drama on the web letting you explore our dramas, catch up on story-lines, discover new characters and share what you find.

Most TV drama on the web is either deep and detailed fan-produced sites or visually rich but shallow sites from the broadcasters. We believe there is a middle way and it seems like there's a space for something here. Something that expresses the richness and depth of the stories that the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ creates.

Read the rest of the entry and watch the video at the R&D blog.

The thrust of our recent strategy submission to the Trust on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online is that we need to do fewer things better. We know that the parts of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online that our users really value are significant, coherent, regularly updated and provide a great marriage of content and technology. Products like , C³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ and iPlayer all have these characteristics; we want much more of the site to have them in future.

A symptom of our previous, less focussed, approach is the number of top level directories - we have on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online, some 400 (this does not include the many re-directs we set up to make it easy to promote sites in our broadcasts). A number of people have asked us to publish the list and anyone who is interested can access it at the end of the extended entry of this post or as a .txt file here.

I know some have questioned the importance of this number, among them . However, tackling the symptom of a problem does provide a real incentive to change, and in meeting the tld challenge we are reviewing the entire site from top to bottom. As a result, we willl be making some tough decisions about what we want to commit to in future, and what not.

The review will, of course, go beyond top level directories and cover all parts of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online. We'll look at every major section of the site and ask three questions: does it meet our public purposes; does it fit one of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's five editorial priorities; how does it perform in terms of reach, quality, impact and value for money? The Trust is currently consulting on the proposed strategy for the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ, which includes proposals about how ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online should develop in the future. Once the Trust has set the overall strategy for the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ we will begin to make major changes to ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online in line with this.

Then there is the question of what to do with sites to which we no longer wish to commit resources. For some time now we have been mothballing older sites like bbc.co.uk/testthenation so that users understand that we are not keeping them up to date. That is fine for now, but the user experience on these sites will inevitably degrade over time, especially as we upgrade the infrastructure which powers ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online - due over the course of the next year. So for sites that we don't want to modernise or simply delete, there is a question about the best way to archive them for future generations and we are looking at the options now. If anyone has a solution to this, we'd be pleased to hear from them.

Erik Huggers is Director, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Future Media & Technology.

Read the rest of this entry

On 18 March 2010 ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ World Service hosted SuperPower Nation day in London, a six hour experiment in multi-lingual debate and discussion.

The idea was to see what would happen if you joined together people from as many language backgrounds as possible and let them communicate freely in their own language in a truly global conversation. The event was broadcast on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Arabic and ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Persian TV, as well as on radio in 15 of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ World Service's languages.

Hi Rafiki: an automatically translated message board

This allowed our audience to read, post and respond to messages in their own language. A user in Sao Paolo, Brazil could post a message in Portuguese that could be read and replied to in Chinese by someone in Beijing, China. The translations weren't always perfect of course, but most of the time they were good enough to get a sense of what was meant.

It was all sited on a single page that included a small, low bit-rate, three screen video-wall streaming live from the venue. Users could opt to open any of the streams in high quality to get a sense of what was happening in the room which included activities as diverse as video conferencing from around the world to live musical performances. In addition, it offered a map showing the locations of the last 10 users to take part in the experiment. But would they come?

How did it work?

Topics ranged from "Is the web a right or a luxury?" to "Is it possible to find love online?". Quite a few users also commented on the experiment itself, like this message from Rozana in Brazil (translated from Portuguese): "What a fantastic, brave new world, did not think I would live to see the man crossing the barrier language. The simply wonderful!"

While we only provided translations of the supported languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese, Persian, Indonesian) we didn't stop users from posting in any other language. By the end of the day messages had been posted in 51 different languages, the top ones being English, Spanish and Portuguese. As for the geographic spread of our users, we had visits from 142 countries with the top ones being United Kingdom, Brazil and the United States.

By treating this day as a big experiment we had greater flexibility around the running of the event. We were keen that as we couldn't predict the format, fierceness or topic of debate we should do everything possible to encourage our users to post messages. By dropping the register-to-post and pre-moderation barriers, users fired-up by the discussion could weigh into the debate quickly. We're very pleased to say that of the 12,000 messages posted only 1.8% of those had to be moderated - a tiny fraction!

User experience design

We provided the ability to 'reply' to any comment on the page, which we thought was an important part of the conversation idea, giving lots of entry points for users. However, the sheer popularity of the event meant that a lot of the replies were being missed by users as so many new messages were coming in at the top of the stack. It was akin to being friends with everyone on Facebook! So whilst our initial problem was trying to get people to post in the first place, the success created its own unforeseen issues. Surfacing new replies is something to figure out for the next iteration. (View a full size image of the GUI.)

How it was built

The core feature of the system is the automatic translation. During the day we presented only seven of the World Service languages, but we built it to be able to handle all languages supported by Google Translate. In fact our audience, as diverse as it was, actually took the opportunity to post messages in over 50 languages.

A user would post or reply to a message on our site which would be routed through and stored on Appengine. This message would sit in a queue awaiting language recognition and translation. On average messages were translated six different ways and returned back to our audience subscribing to the live feed within 30 seconds. By the end of the day the system had performed over 100,000 translations.

Because we removed the need pre-register to post a message, we were clearly vulnerable to spam attacks as well as use of vulgar and obscene language. In order to protect ourselves from this we built in a profanity filter for each of the supported languages, support for IP banning and , into the administration screen. Use of CAPTCHAs was seen as a last resort because it can be problematic for users with non-latin keyboards.

With the message board being reactively moderated, it was essential that during the six hour debate we had an editorial representative from each of our seven supported languages checking the content of the messages, moderating those which were felt to break the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's House Rules in addition to feeding back interesting quotes to editorial colleagues.

What's next?

In the future it would be good if the conversation we spark could continue after our involvement has come to an end. One idea we had was to host the debate entirely on using a simple . Our sites would serve as a portal to the discussion, presenting the translated messages and featuring discussion points, but it would mean the discussion could take on a life of its own. Of course moderation of Tweets carrying our hashtag would be absolutely necessary to avoid the potential for embarrassment.

We see this experiment as the start of something much bigger. With our 32 different language newsrooms and a truly global audience we believe we are ideally placed to experiment more in this field. As all-pervasive internet continues to make inroads into some of our less-well connected language markets, we see a great opportunity to bring global events such as the and closer to our audience and our audiences closer to each other.

Henrik Pettersson, Tom Leitch, Matthew Isherwood and Alexi Paspalas
³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ World Service Future Media

• Read on the Google Translate blog.
• Visit the SuperPower website.
• Read on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News website.
• Read SuperPower Nation: Live on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Blogworld.

We are in the process of making some major improvements to the .

These changes will roll-out over the next few months and include a redesign of the site and a re-engineering of the supporting technical systems. We'll be sharing the details on these changes in this blog in the coming weeks.

The first set of changes we are making will see us upgrading the News Website story HTML to use CSS layout instead of table-based layout. The appearance will be the same. The new HTML will be lighter-weight and more accessible. At the same time we will cease to publish the low graphics version of both the News and Sport websites. These versions are scheduled to be switched off on 6 April.

The was designed as a low bandwidth alternative to the full website at a time when most users of the site were using slow dial-up connections. Now, most of our users are on much faster broadband connections and as a result, the percentage of users of this service has steadily declined to a current level around 2%.

The reason to close the low graphics is not simply based on the percentage of users but because we are making a wider set of improvements that meet most of the needs of people currently using this version.

We know that there are some users who are accessing the site on slow connections or via a mobile device. For those users we are providing a clearer link to the mobile version of the site. This site shares many of the characteristics of the low graphics site in that the pages are simplified and have a much lower page weight than the full web site.

As Erik Huggers, Director of Future Media and Technology recently explained, we are also working on improving our range of mobile services beginning with an application for the iPhone followed by services for other platforms.

For users of the Sports site, using the mobile version has the additional benefit in that it provides a much richer service around live coverage and statistics than the current low graphics site.

We know that another major reason why people use the low graphics version is that it is simpler to read. For people with reading difficulties this is very important. The alternative we will now be offering provides a similarly simplified presentation.

And as mentioned above, at the same time that we are turning off low graphics, we will be upgrading the HTML of News story pages to a much improved CSS layout. The News front page and other section pages will be following soon after alongside a redesign of their layout and the Sport site will be similarly updated later this year.

This summer, we are also expecting to roll out a suite of accessibility tools. These are designed to provide much better support to a range of users - especially those with Lo-vision, Asperger's, Dyslexia, ADHD, or those who find text hard to read. For those who have been using low graphics as a more accessible version, these new tools will provide a much better service. You can find out more about it over on the Ouch website.

We're also aware that some enterprising developers have built services off the low graphics output. For people interested in building on our content, visit .

What about old content?

At the same time as these changes we are also switching off our legacy PDA site and Avantgo services. These predate our browser mobile service and the URLs for those services will be redirected to the mobile site.

Anthony Sullivan is Executive product manager, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ news website.

The Guardian reports that :

"The Office of Fair Trading is to examine , the video-on-demand service backed by the and others, giving critics including and Virgin Media a chance to submit their concerns to competition authorities for the first time."

Meanwhile the Project Canvas website . Remember Arqiva? They're the ones who bought Project Kangaroo (now ) when .

The Guardian's hosted by Matt Wells and "performing monkey" (her words) Emily Bell has an interview with "³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Internet overlord Erik Huggers" (Wells's words) and an analysis of his speech at last week's Guardian's Changing media Conference. After Erik's piece there's some interesting comments about the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's Strategy Review from Emily Bell so keep listening. Wells's other :

"Mad thought... Eric (sic) Huggers for next ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ director general?"

For ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ watchers who didn't make it to the conference there's an courtesy of featuring ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ online Controller Seetha Kumar (details of the rest of the panel are somewhere in this ).

Going against the general trend by not demanding that the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ cut its services, Paidcontent . The reasoning is simple:

"The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ must commission a quarter of its online work from external suppliers, so Pact members are concerned at loss of work."

The Press Red blog reports that there have been over one million iPlayer views on the Nintendo Wii downloads of the iPlayer Wii channel. (Ed's update: my error, now corrected.) There's also been a software upgrade that introduces new features like the Resume Playback function:

"You can now resume watching partially viewed programmes from the point you were watching previously, like you can on the web version of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer. Plus we have added a list of your previously watched programmes. You can see that in action within the improved home page."

Phil Bradley bemoans the "sad state of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ search" on ("Where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Web 2.0 resources, search engines and their development") which has prompted a .

On The Editors Steve Hermann is asking for your feedback on how ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ news should link to external sources.

Paul Murphy is the Editor of the Internet blog.

This is just a quick post to invite you to head over to The Editors blog at ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News.

Why? Because Steve Herrmann is asking for your views on how ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News links to other websites:

The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Strategy Review recently unveiled by director general Mark Thompson set as one of its goals a major increase in outbound links from the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ website - a doubling of the number of "click-throughs" to external sites from 10 million to 20 million a month by 2013... Elsewhere, there has been a detailed debate, specifically about how we link to articles in scientific journals. If you want to catch up with that, it's been taking place at and in Paul Bradshaw's ... So for various reasons it feels like high time to take stock.

So, please do join in.

Nick Reynolds is Social Media Executive, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ FM&T

The creative industries are in a period of unprecedented change. The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's recent strategy review was about how we deliver the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's enduring public service mission in a digital age. What does this mean for ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online? The headlines are well reported. We intend to:

• Halve the number of top-level domains
• Reduce spend against the service licence by 25%
• Act as a window on the web - doubling the traffic we send to others
• Focus content on five editorial priorities

FM&T: What we do

The first is Future Media. This department builds products such as the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer, TV and mobile applications, and the interactive Red Button TV services. Fundamentally it looks at the needs of the audience, and builds digital products to deliver our content to them in innovative ways.

The second is the Broadcast and Enterprise Technology Group; responsible for keeping us on-air 24-7, and building the end to end technology infrastructure for our new premises in Broadcasting House and Salford. They also support the IT requirements of our 23,000 staff.

Third is R&D. With sixty years of engineering heritage, this division has produced innovations that have become commonplace in the home: colour television, teletext, NICAM stereo, and Freeview HD.

Finally, Information and Archives: otherwise known as the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Archive. In the archive lies some of the greatest moments in British broadcasting history.

All of these departments combine to make the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ fit for the digital future.

What the audience wants

The audience is increasingly migrating online. The huge uptake of smartphones, and the next generation of Internet Connected TV devices are bringing powerful computing devices into our everyday lives. Many people now access the internet without even turning on a computer.

By 2014, we expect the internet to come of age. Penetration will be up there with TV and Radio, with the medium establishing itself as a genuine third platform. Already we reach 52% of the online audience with >28 million unique users a week and we expect both the online audience, and our percentage of reach, to grow.

This is a fragmented audience. Generally speaking, older audiences view the internet as a source of information, while younger audiences view the internet more as a source of entertainment - viewing video content, social networking, listening to music. In other words, the internet is TV and radio for young people. Do we expect these younger audiences to abandon the internet when they hit their thirties? Of course not. This is a new generation, empowered by abundant choice, who expect to be able to access whatever content or services they want, whenever they want.

Pointing to a single-service future

From - one service, one platform, one medium in 1922 - to the arrival of TV and a second platform which spawned more services. Digital technologies ushered in the multi-channel world we inhabit today, and with them a third medium - the internet.

And as the internet comes to the living-room through television sets, it will become more important still - and indeed, one day, may be the only platform and delivery system that the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ needs to fulfil its public purposes. The internet is not an optional extra then; it is the future for the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ just as it is for the rest of the broadcasting and communications sectors.

³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online: a pan-³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ service

This is both a strength and a weakness. While more representative than any other ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ service of the breadth of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's output, as the content created originates from a wide range of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ divisions this partly explains why it resembles a collection of websites rather than a single service greater than the sum of its parts.

The digital audience has more choice, less time, and a greater expectation that they can get what they want, wherever they want - so we have to work harder to make it easier for them to discover our content. In addition to editorial and scheduling, search, navigation, social discovery and recommendation will help the audience to find what they want.
This move to an internet-connected world requires changes in the way we create content, and the way in which we deliver it. Never before has a service required such a strong partnership between editorial and technology: content and products.

Online products must be useful, simple, up to date and timely. And editorially, we will focus on five core priorities. It is through this lens we will prioritise investment in new content, as well as decide what of our existing online content will stay, go, or be reorganised. These priorities will also influence our archive strategy.

From 400 websites to 200 - and one coherent service

The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's online strategy has, for many years, been to play a supporting role to our broadcast output. Programme first, website later. This is not the best way to deliver our public purposes in a digital age. We are moving away from the disparate approach of the past, and to create a single coherent ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online which is greater than the sum of its parts. We will look at each component part of the service through three lenses; first, the degree to which it delivers our public purposes; second, the degree to which it fits our editorial priorities; and third, like any other ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ service, how it scores in terms of reach, quality, impact and value.

Our three screen world

It is a service that has evolved with technology. Our first web-based service launched in 1994, was solely accessed via computers. The evolution of web-enabled phones allowed us to repurpose ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online content for access on internet-connected mobile phones in 2000, and the next generation of internet-connected TV devices emerging today will signal the next wave of innovation.

The portable device - mobile applications

³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online has had a presence on the mobile web for some time now, but at Mobile World Congress earlier this month, I announced plans to create new mobile applications for smartphones. These applications repurpose existing ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online content, optimised for immediacy and simple access on the move.

We start with a news application on the iPhone in April, followed by a sport application in time for the World Cup. We will introduce these applications to a range of devices throughout the year; repurposing our core ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online propositions.

The shared screen - TV applications

But with no common standards, we've seen a fragmented market emerge, with the TV manufacturers, set-top box manufacturers, gaming consoles, linear TV platforms, and new market entrants all looking to create a foothold in the connected-TV market.

We don't yet know how this is going to play out. It could be that, as Apple did in mobile and digital music, one company creates an end-to-end user experience and creates a de-facto market standard that the consumer and content providers will follow. Or, an open platform like can create an ecosystem that allows the wider market to set its own terms, free from third-party gatekeepers.

To date, we've focussed on bringing video-on-demand to the living room. We've enabled ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer for the Virgin Media TV platform, and the Nintendo Wii and Playstation 3 gaming platforms. All Freesat HD boxes can now access the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer also. Both Samsung and Sony connected TVs will support ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer applications and we continue to take an open approach to working with new partners.

But this is about more than the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer - itself a subset of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online. Canvas is an open platform which will deliver rich multi-media content from right across the internet, including ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online.

Consistent user experience

With this in mind, we have created a new design template for the site. This new user experience, created by the Future Media team in conjunction with creative direction from designer Neville Brody, will be integrated across the service in 2010-2011. It's a clean new design that introduces consistency of style, usability and accessibility.

The future

³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online is linear and on-demand, social and personal. The internet's dynamism and interactivity allows us to weave ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ content into the wider web, making our content part of the social web through discovery and recommendation.

³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online can work across multiple devices seamlessly, making existing content available in the most convenient way for audiences. Finish the programme you started watching last night on the TV, resume on your Blackberry on the bus to work. Check your favourites at your desk at lunch-time and catch up on the comedy you missed last week. Download a podcast and listen to it on the way home. All this becomes possible with a seamless service that's available whenever you want it, through whichever device. ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online will make the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ relevant to every single person in the UK, and leave plenty of room for others in the process.

Erik Huggers is Director, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Future Media & Technology.

Ed's note: The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer stats for February are in and are available to download as a PDF: ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer publicity pack February 2010. Here are the highlights from the press office (PM):

"February 2010 was another record breaking month for ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer as we had the highest number of TV programme requests we've seen, an increase 81% year on year from Feb 2009. We also saw daily users and daily requests hit new heights with 1.4million and 3.5 million respectively. EastEnders Live proved to be the most popular TV show this month, with 1.1 million requests, and the birthday edition of The Chris Moyles Show was the most popular radio programme.

We've seen ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer continue to grow on the Nintendo Wii, increasing by another point - but the really interesting news is that for the first time we're releasing new data about ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer on Virgin Media, and some 'time spent' data. 64 minutes was the average amount of time people used ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer per week in February to watch TV programmes, and 163 minutes was the weekly average for radio.

Headlines and the pack are both below:

• Total requests for Feb 2010 was 116.4 million, including a record-breaking 68.7 million requests for TV programmes.
• February 2010 saw an average of 1.4 million users per day.
• A record 3.5m requests per day on average, with new benchmarks set for both TV (2.5m average) and radio (1.1m average).
• ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer on Nintendo Wii continues to perform well, increasing by another 1 point, to become 4% of  total requests for ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer.
• 64 minutes is the average amount of time per user per week watching TV programmes.
• EastEnders Live and the birthday edition of The Chris Moyles Show were the most popular TV and radio programmes on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer in February.
• Nintendo Wii reached over 1 million installs of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer on Wii channel."

Paul Murphy is the Editor of the Internet blog.

• Download Publicity_pack_February_2010.pdf

Ed's note: I wanted to let you know that the Head of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ HD Danielle Nagler has published her first post on the TV blog. You can read What do you want to see on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ HD over Easter? on the TV blog where you can also leave your comments. (PM)

Being a (relatively) new kid on the channel block, we at the HD channel are keen to try things out and I wanted to let you know about one of them. We aim to broadcast the best of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's programmes - and I'm very aware that each and every one of you will have a different view about what "our best" is.

So, over Easter weekend, we're proposing to hand over a number of those choices to you - our viewers.

At the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ HD's website you will find a selection of 30 programmes we've broadcast over the last year, representing every kind of programme we show, from Life to Shaun The Sheep, from A History Of Christianity, via Psychoville, to Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and of course Doctor Who and Top Gear.

Read the rest of this post and leave a comment on the TV blog.

You may also find James Thornett's post about the 2011 ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖpage beta of interest - inserted Ian McDonald 21 Sep 2011

Last week we launched a new version of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ homepage at . At first you might think seems pretty familiar, with its modular customisable layout. But take a closer look and you'll notice we've made a number of significant improvements.

Let me start by providing some background on why we released this new ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ homepage beta. Back in May 2008 the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ announced plans to build a new service-oriented architecture, to help us scale our products and services, keep up with ever evolving web technologies and to deliver new features more quickly. The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ homepage is one of our first sites to be moved to this new infrastructure.

Initially we planned a simple 'lift and shift' of the current homepage to the new platform. However, since we had to completely rebuild the homepage for the new architecture, it would have been remiss for us not to deliver some new features and improvements to the site.

The first improvement you'll notice on the beta homepage is the introduction of a new navigation bar across the top of the page. With the new navigation bar you'll get easier and faster access to the most popular sites across the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ. If the site you're looking for isn't listed, simply choose from the 'More' drop down menu, or type what you're looking for in the Search box.

Very soon this navigation bar will appear across the entire ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ web site - not just the homepage. In order to fit the most popular links onto the navigation bar and allow for consistency across all ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ web sites, we had to keep its overall size down. As a result we have (somewhat controversially) removed the clock from the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ homepage header. We've already received feedback from some users who miss the clock, but rest assured we are working on a clock module to be released soon, which you'll be able to add to your personalised version of the homepage.

One of the strengths of bbc.co.uk is that we have depth and breadth of online content. But it also creates a challenge, as we have too much content to try and fit onto the homepage all at once. The new Media Zone is a promotional area at the top of the page that showcases the range of content, and helps users discover more of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ. Simply roll your mouse over the thumbnails to scroll through the content.

Two key themes for our online team's product releases over the coming months are "Personalisation" and "Now", allowing you to tune your ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ experience to the things that you're interested in, as well as showcasing what's happening across the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ at that time.

In terms of personalisation user testing showed us that while people liked the ability to remove, rearrange or add widgets on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ what people valued more was finer-grained personalisation of content within those widgets. So, for example, the updated music widget now lets you choose your favourite music genres and it delivers the latest matching music programmes.

We've also introduced several features to give you a better sense of what's happening across the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ right now.

On the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer widget there is a new "Just In" feature that allows you to see programmes as soon as they become available in iPlayer. Another key part of the "now" proposition is the introduction of Topic Tracker, a new widget we're trialling which gives you a unique way to keep up to date with the topics you're interested in.

Topic Tracker allows quick and easy access to the breadth of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ content tailored to your personal interests - from your favourite shows to hot topics and stories. Simply click on an image from the hot topics, or search for your own favourite topics. Then select the best match from the list provided and you're set to get frequent updates on your interests.

In the example shown, I'm tracking Barack Obama, Lewis Hamilton and Kylie Minogue. So when I return to the homepage I see the latest ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ content on each of my interests. In this case I've got the latest news articles related to Barack Obama and Lewis Hamilton, but there have been no new stories about Kylie Minogue in the past 24 hours.

You can expand or collapse the number of stories you see using the arrows next to the topic name. The topics listed in Topic Tracker are provided by our Search team. At the start of this year, we told you about enhancements to our site search, a consequence of which is that we can start to bring more relevant and up to date content to other ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ sites.

Topic Tracker already offers more than 11,000 topics from across the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ, and we'll continue to add more topics over time. One of the benefits of Topic Tracker is that we'll be able to see the most popular topics across our audience, allowing us to create a real-time zeitgeist of the hottest topics, as determined by our users.

The new beta homepage also includes many design tweaks which you'll find makes it faster to load and easier to use. For example the iPlayer and Music module carousels now use simple left and right arrows to scroll through the carousel content. The addition of time stamps for the top news stories shows you the latest updates at a glance, and we've used a refreshed colour palette to simplify the page experience.

These visual changes are not actually part of the new global visual language (GVL) that we announced last month, but certainly stepping stones in that direction. As the GVL evolves we'll be looking to incorporate more elements of the new visual language on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ homepage.

Finally, the new technical architecture we mentioned at that start of this blog post will help us deliver many more improvements across all of our online products and services. In future you'll be able to seamlessly roam your personalised ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ homepage across all your devices. For example you'll be able to add your favourite football club to Topic Tracker, and then see your same favourite topics on your mobile phone, office computer, and perhaps one day even on your TV courtesy of services like .

We've made many other smaller improvements to the homepage, and the new platform will allow us to continue to deliver new features more quickly and easily. Try the new and tell us what you think.

Jo Wickremasinghe is Head of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖpage and Syndication Services.

You may have noticed that slowly but surely, we're moving all our existing services to a new sign in system, called . You might also notice that anything we build from now on uses ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iD from the start. So far we've migrated all our blogs, nearly all our messageboards, and our three big communities: , and H2G2.

A few people have posted blog comments asking why we've done this, and what what it means for the future. I thought I'd write this to help explain what we're doing and why.

So, why did we build ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iD?
The simple answer is that our old system - called 'Single Sign On', or SSO - needed replacing. It had been around for nearly 6 years, skillfully powering all the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's online services which required authentication, but 6 years is a long time on the web. SSO has been showing its age in some very specific ways:

The technology platform
SSO was built on Perl and MySQL. Good technologies for their time, but the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ is moving towards a new online architecture (internally called 'Forge') which uses Java and PHP on top of MySQL, Apache and Memcached. Soon, the old Perl-based system will be turned off. SSO would have to have been ported to Forge anyway, so it was a good time to completely refresh it from the ground up.

Performance
SSO used a single MySQL database instance. Forge allows applications to have multiple partitioned databases - which helps to make it horizontally scalable. This means that as ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iD gets used more and more, we can make it perform simply by adding more servers. Until recently, you only signed in to small pockets of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ - the odd messageboard here, a one-off application there.

However, with the advent of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iD, nearly every page on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online will know if you're signed in or not, and will be able to adjust itself accordingly. This new level of personalisation will allow ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online to grow and personalise around you in ways that were never before possible. But this level of integration, and load, will needed a totally new architecture which made heavy use of partitioned (sharded) databases, Memcache, and load balancing.

Internationalisation
³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online continues to grow its audience internationally, and has a staggering number of language sites. As these sites want to do things like personalisation, they need sign in features in their native language. Adding features like these retroactively to a product is really hard - they have to be built in from the start. One more reason why we knew SSO had to be replaced.

Although the first versions of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iD are english-only, under the hood, it's been designed with internationalisation in mind. For example, every bit of text you see isn't embedded into the code, it comes from a language specific package. We're now working on increasing the number of supported locales. This will eventualy include not only the main UK languages like Welsh and Gaelic, but languages with different characters (like cyrillic in Russian) and right-to-left text (persian etc) - in fact, anything you can throw at Unicode.

Security
Since SSO was developed, security techniques and technologies have moved on a lot. For example, a while back it was impossible to support the loads we needed to support and encrypt data both in transit and on disk. Now, that's possible. As such, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iD has been built from the ground up with very secure architecture in mind. All personal data is stored on disk encrypted, all personal data is transferred over https, and inside the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ there are strict access controls put in place to make sure only the staff who are authorised have access to it. While SSO was good for its time, the security model had to be thoroughly rethought.

But why build your own sign-in system at all?
, , - the modern web is full of distributed, decentralised identity systems. We could have just forgotten about building our own system, and just implemented one, or all, of these.

Well, the good news is they're on their way! ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iD was built from the ground up to be compatible with and other distributed authentication systems and later this year, we'll be introducing the ability for you to sign in to ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online using your Facebook login via Facebook Connect, and your Google and Yahoo logins (and more) via OpenID.

However, we still felt we needed our own base-level sign in system, both for those users who don't have external logins they want to use, and also for those who just don't want these things linked together. As the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ has a mandate to serve all licence fee payers, building our own standalone system was a necessary evil.

Truly, Single Sign On
The biggest problem with the old SSO system was that, although it was actually a bbc-wide sign on system, almost none of our users realised this. It was mainly down to some user-experience descisions within the SSO interface. While a tiny percentage did use their SSO account for more than one service, nearly everyone created a new SSO account for each ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ service they registered for. We're trying to move ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online to become a more social, more coherent website. As such, it's essential that our users realise they're signing into the whole ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ site - not just a part of it.

With the old SSO model, we had ghettos of interactivity which didn't connect with each other or the rest of the site; each had their own users, their own rules and their own user interfaces. This made it impossible to represent users on every part of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online consistently.

³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iD solves this problem in two ways.

Firstly, you can only have one ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iD per email address. This is made clear as soon as you try and create a second ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iD with the same email address. A single ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iD can be used across ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online and a person can have more than one ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iD, but they'll need a separate personal email address to register with for each one. Contrary to some comments on our blogs, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iDs are not limited by IP address, so you can have more than one per household. The email address is the important unique field.

Secondly, we created a 'brand' for our login. We're not the first to do this, , , all do it. And remember ? We'd rather not have called it anything, but we did lots of testing that showed that people didn't realise their login was global across our site unless we branded it. We've been careful to keep is a 'soft' brand though. It's represented by colour, language and iconography. This consistent message should remind users where ever they see the 'Cid' symbol (Cid's the bod on the badges pictured above, derived from BBC iD) and the words 'sign in', that they can use the same sign in details they use elsewhere on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online.

By contrast, SSO's sign in and register pages were branded to match the service you came from - further reinforcing the impression that SSO was service-specific sign in.

But it's a pain to upgrade
Yes it is. Transitioning users from the old system to the new system is not easy. We could have just copied all the old user data from SSO into our new system, but that would have meant millions, literally millions, of old, dead unused accounts in our nice, clean, new system. Instead, we chose to allow our users to 'upgrade' their old SSO accounts to ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iD. While this is a little annoying for some users, it is a one-time only process, and means the users we have in ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iD have new, clean data - and best of all, it means people can register with sensible usernames again. With 13 million accounts created over 8 years, SSO was full of old, bad data.

We take our users' experiences very seriously, so we've done all we can to make the upgrade process simple, reliable and quick. There will always be some people who experience problems, but we monitor our stats and our help email addresses very closely and try and help each and every one of our users who has problems.

Will it be worth it?
The short answer is, yes.

Change is often disruptive, but necessary. The rollout of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iD across ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online will allow our site to do incredible new things - more personalisation, better interactivity and provide more security to our users. Without this move to use ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iD, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online would not be able to build, grow and become a properly modern interactive, coherent site.

Simon Cross is the Product Manager for ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iD.

The kerfuffle around the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's move into mobile apps continues with New Media Age's story . In the piece David Newell of the Newspaper Publishers Association criticised the:

'³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Trust's "current attitude and inaction... when they know that the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ will be launching such apps in direct competition with commercial operators' paid-for or ad-funded apps for their online services."'

'"Following some initial concerns they raised, we invited the NPA to write to us explaining their concerns...We've received their letter and will look forward to discussing it with them."'

'...May I point out that the online service licence was written before the launch of the Apple app store. How it can cover services and markets unknown when it was written is a topic we look forward to discussing with the Trust when we manage to find a slot in their very crowded diaries.'

Ben Goldacre, he of fame, has been petitioning the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ :

'I'm trying ...to persuade the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ to give meaningful weblinks in their online science and health articles, at the moment they link to journal homepages, and university homepages, which are absurdly uninformative and unhelpful.'

There's more on this at the .

The latest happening in the is the :

'The events of the past two weeks (, , here and here) have clarified the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's stance on allowing interoperability with open-source iPlayer clients. I have therefore decided to withdraw get_iplayer with immediate effect...

'The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer is built on many open-source products and yet, in this case, they have failed to let open-source clients access the very same service. The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ have clearly not followed the spirit of open-source here.'

Going against the tide of comments () on blogs and Twitter is :

'Licence fee payers no longer liable or subsidising insurance for the theft of material by get_iPlayer's users.'

And finally, as they say, the excellent R&D blog has some new posts that might interest you: Ambisonics and Periphony [part 1] (on three-dimensional sound) and A Touch Less Remote: Part 1 of 6 (on multi-touch devices).

Paul Murphy is the Editor of the Internet blog. The picture shows the switchboard at Television Centre as it was in 1960.

There's a about the implications for ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's Strategy Review:

The internet has emerged from a silo called "new media" to become a genuine third platform alongside TV and radio, and we can't continue on a track of aimless expansion... It's true that we had started some of this work, which is why we've closed or mothballed some sites already, but this formalises the next steps in line with a broader ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ strategy and sets out a clear and stronger ambition in this area.

Econsultancy has a useful summary of . Alfred Hermida has created

³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News have launched a season called Superpower today. Peter Horrock's blog post has full details:

We also aim to also reflect what is being said on the web about the season and about world events. Blogworld will highlight the best of blogosphere in multiple languages, while the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News website has partnered with the non-profit network of citizen journalists Global Voices to give different perspectives on the news.

And away from all this hurly burly Cole Henley has about ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iD.

Nick Reynolds is Social Media Executive, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online

A number of our users have expressed concern about ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer's recent content protection enhancements. It's a complex area so I asked our techical team for an explanation of what has happened. Here it is:

We make iPlayer content available in a variety of media formats (WMV, H.264, 3GP, MPEG, etc) many of which are , or at least not tied to a particular company's products.

In order to respect the rights agreements that allow us to make the content available in the first place, we use a range of content protection techniques and technologies:

- for downloads, we use digital rights management systems (Windows Media, Adobe, and OMA)

- for streaming, we use systems like SSL, RTMP, RTSP, HTTP

Many of these content delivery methods are open-source.

We also implement a range of technologies that attempt to check that our content is being played out in iPlayer, and not in an unauthorised 3rd-party application. This is because we need to be as certain as we can be that our content rights restrictions are being respected.

This is the key to the concerns being expressed at the moment: before we allow a device to access our content we need to check that it is iPlayer and not an application which might break our rules - for example, by storing programmes beyond the 30 day limit, or playing them outside the UK.

We know that a number of applications have been making unauthorised use of some media types and we have tightened security accordingly - this was done for several of the formats and content delivery types, not just for Flash. The result was that some applications that 'deep link' to our content may no longer work.

It's important to note that this has nothing to do with Flash, and it's nothing to do with support for open-source. In fact we continue to make our content available as H.264 or SSL, both of them open standards that have nothing to do with Flash or with Adobe. It's simply that the first people to be affected by this change happened to be linking to our Flash streams, which now have similar protection levels to our open-source streams.

The discussion around this issue suggests that two different uses of the term "open source" are being conflated:

a) we continue to make our content available in a range of open-source formats

b) unfortunately , an open-source media player.

But the two "open sources" are quite different to each other - we have no particular attachment to Flash over open-source formats. In fact most of iPlayer is built on open-source products. However, we do need to protect our content from applications that threaten to make unauthorised use of it, even if those applications are themselves open source.

To answer Mo's comment, of course the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ does not want people to download content illegally. That's precisely why we have built rights related constraints into ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer. If an application becomes broken, people will be able to find alternatives which are legal and that we support. ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer is already available on many, many devices and platforms which are legal and supported and in the coming year we will be adding as many new ones as we can.

Ian Hunter is Managing Editor, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online

Nick Thomas, an analyst at Forrester Research, has posed the question on paidcontent.co.uk

The simple answer is yes: we have responsibilities for digital switchover, we are investing in digital infrastructure and we will continue to provide great digital content and services.

Mark Thompson that the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ is not in retreat from digital content and that we know this is not what audiences want. In fact over on silicon.com today they've just published

The proposals announced this week are about providing clear focus in key priority areas to provide greater long term value to audiences and a more open approach to a wider online market. Doing fewer things to an even higher standard. ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online is very much part of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's future and we remain absolutely committed to the web as a third platform alongside TV and Radio.

³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online reaches 53% of the online audience with 28 million users a week. As our third medium, it needs to meet ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ standards for quality, impact and effectiveness even more than it currently does today. The proposals also state that as the internet comes to the living-room through television sets, it will become more important still--and indeed, one day, may be the only platform and delivery system that the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ needs to fulfil its public purposes. You can read the full details of the proposals .

Kerstin Mogull is Chief Operating Officer, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Future Media & Technology.

Ed's note: There's a post Social Media and Accountability you may also be interested in where we asked for your feedback on accountability and the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's use of social media. (PM)

There are many blogs at the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ. Some of them (Peston, Robinson et al) are hugely popular. They've become an important part of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's output in their own right, substantial content properties - especially in news and sport.

Other ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ blogs do a more specific job: they're part of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's effort to be more open and accountable. This blog is a good example but there are others: the About the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ blog and the TV blog, for instance. And the network blogs at ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Audio & Music that I'm responsible for (Radio 3, Radio 4 and 5 live) have been doing this for some time. But why have we attached blogs to the radio networks at all? What are we trying to achieve?

We want to do three things:

• Hold our networks to account (for example, Adrian Van Klaveren questioned on the 5 live blog). We ask the managers and editors who run the networks the kind of questions our listeners ask - why did you commission that series? How do you justify the expense of this programme or that presenter? We're pretty sure that blogs are better for this purpose than most other devices because blogs have editors, people who sit between the listeners and the bosses, commissioning posts from the network and answering questions from readers.
• Take our listeners behind the scenes (for example, Archers Week on the Radio 4 blog). Explain the processes that produce the programmes we all listen to. There's a real appetite for this stuff and you'll see a lot of it all around the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ blogs (here on the Internet blog especially). Nothing we do can be a 'black box' any more, there's a legitimate interest in the way we do things, the editorial decisions made along the way. The process is as important as the content.
• Reflect what people are saying about our networks (example, ). We can republish and link to newspaper reviews, blog posts and tweets about our output. And when we do this we won't stick to the good reviews: we'll try to represent the breadth of opinion about what we do.

We don't always get this right and there's a necessary balance to be struck. The blogs need to be the authentic voice of the network - we're insiders, not outsiders - while at the same time able to question its most senior managers about their decisions. Readers need to be sure what they're hearing is from the horse's mouth and not made up by a spokesperson, for instance. But they also need to be confident that hard questions won't be ignored because someone's afraid of upsetting the boss.

So, on the 5 live blog a couple of weeks ago - during 'social media week' - we ran a series of blog posts about the network's use of social media. We did this because social media has been one of the biggest issues with commenters on the blog lately. We interviewed five important 5 live people. Three presenters: Rhod Sharp (Up All Night), Victoria Derbyshire (1000 - 1200 weekdays) and Richard Bacon (1400-1600 weekdays). Two producers: Richard Jackson (Breakfast) and Jo Tongue (606) also joined in. We wanted to know why they used social media (Facebook, Twitter, blogs...) and how. We wanted to know if using social media was a cheap way of filling airtime or a valid way of engaging listeners. Was the expense of running multiple social media forums worth it? Why are some presenters using Facebook and others not. Why are we closing blogs?

The result was five pretty popular blog posts - two interviews on video and three text Q&As - from editors and presenters responsible for over 60 hours of programming weekly. Between them their blog posts have been viewed over 10,000 times (approximate number from the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's web stats service) and we've seen a wide range of opinions presented in over 130 comments. For the radio networks, this is a good start but we've still got a way to go:

• We want a larger and broader audience. The views of licence fee-payers obviously can't reasonably be represented in 130-odd comments! This will require more publicity for what we do on-air, on other web pages and in places like the Radio Times.
• We should do this more regularly. Managers and editors need to make the network blogs part of their routine - and get used to bringing their big decisions there first.
• We must persuade managers and editors to read and comment on blogs, as well as writing for them. Once it's part of their morning routine to check the blogs for comments and new posts they'll be much more comfortable joining in.

When blogs (or messageboards for that matter) fail, it's often because ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ people don't join in - because they're nervous of the extra exposure, because they're accustomed to communication with licence fee-payers being mediated by the PR department or because they don't understand the two-way nature of these new tools.

The network blogs at ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Audio & Music are a real effort to overcome these habits and misgivings and get ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ radio people into dialogue with their listeners. And, of course, it won't work at all if you don't join in too! Please do.

Steve Bowbrick is blogs editor at ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Audio & Music

• The 5 live blog social media week posts: Rhod Sharp (Up All Night), Victoria Derbyshire (1000 - 1200 weekdays) and Richard Bacon (1400-1600 weekdays), Richard Jackson (Breakfast) and Jo Tongue (606).
• Follow and on Twitter.
• The picture is from a set taken late last year.
• Read the post Social Media and Accountability and leave your feedback on the use of social media and accountability at the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ. (PM)

This is a post of course to say hello - but also a sort of goodbye.

For the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ - as for all of us - HD at the start was about technology. For that reason, engaging through the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Internet blog made absolute sense.

But in the nearly four years since we began HD broadcasts - this summer will see the second World Cup to be broadcast by the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ in HD - the technology has matured to an extent, and the challenges for us have also expanded. You remind me frequently of the importance - and quite understandable frustrations - around scheduling, sign-posting HD content, and the choices we continue to make about the programmes that will and will not be in HD. I've continued to try to address these questions alongside those about the ways we use HD broadcast technology within this blog because I know that an interested community has assembled here. But increasingly HD - which in my view at the moment is primarily a television rather than an internet technology - has sat slightly oddly with the other topics covered here.

A ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Television blog is now up and running and feels like a natural home for my postings. ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ HD is in the process of growing up, and it feels appropriate that its blogosphere life should take place alongside the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's other television channels. I hope that as many of you as would like to, will join me there to share in the continuing development of what we are doing in HD. I will of course keep across the discussions here - I will continue to comment where it feels appropriate, and Andy Quested (Head of Technology for ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ HD) will continue to publish here when there are more complex technical issues to deal with.

I believe firmly that HD is the future of television, the next stage on a journey which has progressively seen what television can offer become both more and more lifelike and "real", and also more and more creatively confident and inspiring through the development of television as "art". ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ HD may be the smallest ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ channel right now - but we're only available of course in those homes which currently have HD connections (around 12% on the last count) and we are probably the fastest growing. Thank you for your support here, and please do move with me on to TV cyberspace on the TV blog.

Danielle

Danielle Nagler is Head of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ HD.

The picture shows the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ World Cup Commentators, 1966. From left to right: Ken Aston, Kenneth Wolstenholme, Wally Barnes, David Coleman, Frank Bough, Alec Weeks and Arthur Ellis.

And a final few post-scripts to respond to questions:

• No news on F1 is neither good news, nor a reflection of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's desire to have F1 to give you in HD: The events are being filmed in HD (as far as we know) but they are not made available by F1 to broadcasters in HD
• I am very sorry about the frustration caused by the Winter Olympics' impact on our schedule - and in particular on Nurse Jackie and Mad Men. We have no scheduling flexibility around these programmes, and a choice to show the Olympics therefore inevitably meant that some episodes were not shown when expected, or in one case not shown at all in HD. We do work with the other channels - and with those from whom we get our content - to try to minimise the occasions when this happens, but with live sports events around - which are by their nature best seen at the time that they happen - there are limits to how far we can use one channel to showcase everything that you would like to see.
• I do have to warn those eagerly awaiting the World Cup that a focus on football will inevitably mean clashes with other programming in June, and with Wimbledon. Of course we will do our best to make sure that all interests are balanced, and there is no question of us not showing an England team match, but I'm already well aware that there will be a lot of juggling, resulting inevitably in some balls landing in places you would prefer them not to...

• Read Danielle Nagler's previous HD posts on the Internet blog.
• Read Andy Quested's previous HD posts on the Internet blog.

As a follow up to yesterday's round up ("Corporation's web pages are to be halved") you might be interested in a few things that have been published this morning.

Mark Thompson has blogged on the About the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ blog about the Strategy Review:

"The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ has one mission: to inform, educate and entertain audiences with programmes and services of high quality, originality and value. That is not up for debate. What today is about is how we are going to deliver that mission."

You can download the Strategy Review from the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Trust website and read all 70 odd pages for yourself. This is one section (on page 36) that caught my attention and perhaps explains the cutting the number of webpages in half confusion.

"The number of sections on the site (its 'top-level directories', which the public find through addresses in the form: bbc.co.uk/sitename) will be halved by 2012, with many sites closed and others consolidated, so that the sharpened focus of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online will be visible in the structure of the service..."

The Guardian this morning. There's also the hastag if you'd like to follow the action there.

Paul Murphy is still the Editor of of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Internet blog (as far as he knows).

Following up on about the blocking of open source implementations of RTMP (real-time messaging protocol) streaming in the iPlayer, The Register and got this reply:

'"The decision to block open source plugins is a matter for ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Management. The Trust has not received any complaints on this issue and has no plans to look into it further at present," a ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Trust spokeswoman told The Register.'

On the subject of I particularly enjoyed . This leads me neatly to the and its now at the end of last week.

have some on who might be responsible and who might benefit most from the leak. Most of the press attention has fallen on the closure of 6Music and the Asian Network but the bit of that naturally caught this blog's attention was:

"The corporation's web pages are to be halved"

"I don't know what this means, and I build web sites for a living. People I know who build web sites for a living don't know what it means. People who work for the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ don't know what it means. Nobody knows what it means because it makes no sense at all. How do you "halve" web pages? Is URI count the principal measure of a site's size? Or is it the amount of content? How much of it is generated automatically from things which the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ has internally anyway? How much of it is user-generated? Once you take away News, Weather, iPlayer, the blogs, the message-boards, H2G2 and /programmes, what do you have left? Maybe the educational stuff should go? Or the games on CBeebies (as much as I dislike Flash, my three year old shares no such derision)? What about the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Food content? Sport? Where must the axe fall?"

The About the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ blog has done a handy round up of coverage to date and more news will no doubt emerge later this week.

In the meantime many individual user's attention has tended to look at the services that they themselves use. THis is from the Points of View messageboards:

"I know we like to moan about the clunking technology, the moderation, the Hosting, the rules, etcetera. But there's something about these ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ boards that keeps me coming back. I think it's because the majority of posters attracted here tend to be articulate, intelligent and mostly with a good sense of humour and 'camaraderie'...Don't axe us, Auntie!"

The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's Rory Cellan-Jones reports on the recent spate of phising attacks on Twitter:

"The direct message from a Twitter friend read: "hey, i've been having better sex and longer with this here..." followed by a link to a website, which I chose not to follow."

Finally there's an on the CIO magazine website:

'The role of the CIO at the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ is a slicing and dicing of many of the traditional CIO functions. "Though it is a CIO job title the scope isn't necessarily what you would traditionally see, so within Future Media & Technology, there are colleagues of mine on the senior leadership team who deal with all the audience-facing technologies and I deal with all the technologies that are delivered to support the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ staff in making the content and running the business," says Hall.'

Paul Murphy is the Editor of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Internet blog. The picture is of the sign that lives above the search team who are located next door to the Internet blog.