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I'm sure the people who lost their only children in the Chinese earthquake would be delighted to know of the central role coverage of China has to your 'brand values' of 'find, play and share'.

Do you ever read out aloud this asinine Birtian tosh to hear just how ridiculous you sound ??

By the fact that you have posted this twaddle, one suspects not. But since you have given up trying to find out and report the truth, and have gone down the road of making us 'tell our own story', one suspects you have thrown out real journalism with the bathwater.

Cue yet more 'churnalism' and allowing us to recycle this tosh for ourselves.

Truly pitiful...

Would BeddGelert care to quantify what he thinks is wrong with the Beebs information gathering machine, and the philisophy of making that info freely available and debating it?

I suspect that in registering his complaint he is giving an unwitting endorsement of that philosophy.

No system is perfect, but at least the Beeb starts out with a policy of freedom of speech, which would seem to be against BeddGelert's principles.

I fully agree BeddGelert, the ghost of Birt is very much alive and stalking the corporate-speak, multi-platform, aggregating (or is it aggravating?) corridors of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ.

The problem is that people like Mr. Clifton spend so much of their time immersed in this - as you so elegantly put it - tosh that they're utterly unaware of how irrelevant and ridiculous they sound to the rest of the world.

Mr. Clifton, it's not how you "showcase content", it's what that content is which makes or breaks the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ. One can stick a dog turd in a gleaming showcase, and it's still a dog turd. It's fairly astonishing that the word 'Tibet' doesn't even pass your lips in this piece.

Britain and the world needs the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ for its unrivalled and fearless journalism, but glossy 'multi-platform strategies' are totally irrelevant to that. Yes - please - make it nice and easy for us to find our way around your content, but don't lose sight of the fact that the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's mission is: content, content, content.

i think you'll find that the content is produced by the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ and this system simply aggregates the content that the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ has already produced, therefore I can only see it as a positive move, surely a better overview of a topic is one which takes into account, blogs, news, external sources, rather than just one of these data feeds?

Darren

Pete - I'm impressed. That's a well designed page and a good resource - I can see this format adding a lot to the site.

lordBeddGelert, perhaps you should attend the Beijing Olympics and spend the entire time reminding everyone - competitors and visitors alike - how they should instead be focussing their energy and emotion on the earthquake. Twaddle indeed. The unrelenting cynicism in these comments never fails to amaze me.

grimble22350,

yes content, content, content is good, but what's the point if you can't find it?

Congrats to the beeb for trying to make sense of all the mases of content they have.

"Would BeddGelert care to quantify what he thinks is wrong with the Beebs information gathering machine, and the philisophy of making that info freely available and debating it?"

My point is that whilst the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ does make an attempt to get at the facts, if all it does is churn a 'one the one hand.. but on the other hand..' set of dichotomies, one cannot in any meaningful way 'share' with others what the news on, for example, climate change is because we aren't actually informed what the truth is.

As someone else points out here, the vapid language of John Birt and the marketing gurus seems to elevate the medium above the message. Marshall McLuhan may have had a point for advertising, but for news the medium IS NOT the message. I don't care how 'sexy' the User Interface is on Digital Telegraph - if they are turning into the Daily Mail because they can't be bothered to pay for foreign bureau then they simply will not have a news operation, just a form of online 'Heat' magazine for the political classes.

"lordBeddGelert, perhaps you should attend the Beijing Olympics and spend the entire time reminding everyone - competitors and visitors alike - how they should instead be focussing their energy and emotion on the earthquake. Twaddle indeed." Dotconnect, you are indeed entitled to your opinion.

My defence is that I am not able to pass on the costs of attending the Beijing Olympics to the poor licence fee payer. Nor do I share the woeful criticism of many readers of the Eye of the series about China which did not mention Tibet, when one wouldn't expect Alan Titchmarsh to expose our own failings in Iraq.

But I do find it astonishingly narrow-minded that when the Six and Ten O'clock news are obtaining ground-breaking coverage of the people who are asking to go on-screen to tell the world of the loss of their children and the palpable grief from this tragedy, and their anger with Chinese building standards, and corruption of those building schools, that a senior ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ bod thinks it is in tune with the mood of the moment to refer to 'playing' with the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's online coverage of China.

Maybe he just meant 'play' in the context of 'playing' a record or tape. But I somehow don't think he did.

"find, play and share"

"Find" what the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ is reporting upon, "play" the video and audio files which are there and "share" it with friends and who else they want to.

Yes, the term could have done with a bit of... refining, but I think that showcasing what the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ does have is important.

And it's not as if the gravitas of the earthquake is not reflected on the site.

To lordBeddGelert and grimble22350

The language used here is precise technical language


Your comments seem to show a touch of technophobia that you can only contextualize or make sense of by using political terms and refering to past bbc bosses. Aggregation is a precise term that
describes the underlying structure of this page and is technical language rather than corporate-speak.

You just seem to enjoy trolling emotive language and provocation rather seriously understanding and engaging with this new development. If you came up with a desciption you were happy with for this development it would probably seem vague and inadequate by technically more literate people.

Would you have a fit if it was described as a dynamically rendered PHP site? or would you humbly google it and learn something new?

If you have problems with ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ journalism post the specific evidence and what the story should say.

You haven't answered Sigardner's question to quantify the problems with this news gathering device (and just choose to make your own points)

Can you suggest any specific actions or steps to improve ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News?

If you want to talk about news instead, what quantitative evidence do you have that school buildings were more likely to collapse than other buildings.


Grimble22350: you are a spokesman for the rest of the world!

marko you stupid techy twit - this is a site for communication to the wider audience in the English language.

"Would you have a fit if it was described as a dynamically rendered PHP site? "

What I would have is the blinding realisation that someone has absolutely no idea about tailoring a message to the relevant audience, and precious little about communication. If you think the above quote represents journalistic high standards, then it is just as well you don't work for the 'Today Programme' let alone the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ.

The idea that one should have to 'google' something in an article without that reflecting badly on the author, rather than the reader, really does beggar belief.

Oh what a fuss over nothing!

If this was a news report, I would have more sympathy with the complaint. But this is an editors blog!

So Pete could have elaborated a bit more. Is it really something that warrants such exaggerated claims as he has "absolutely no idea about tailoring a message to the relevant audience, and precious little about communication"?

I see this kind of hyperbole a lot on these boards. After a while, you start to wonder if some of the people who post here have simply been terminally effected by their continued exposure to the country's newspapers and their unrelenting negativity, where every little slip or mistake is deemed a fiasco, a shambles and an outrage (especially if it involves the government or anything publicly funded).

The Telegraph, who aren't exactly fans of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ, also like to use pompous words like tosh and twaddle.

I can't make much sense of Marko's post at 9 above- does that make me stupid? Or maybe Marko hasn't spoken to any real people for a while. Plus I can't find any suggestion by LordBellGelert in his posts that school buildings were more likely to collapse than other buildings. In any country I would expect (for reasons that might even be obvious to Marco) the state's schools to be built to a much higher standard than self-built peasant cottages or stuff put up by speculative builders. If that wasn't the case in China, then surely lordBeddGelert's point is perfectly valid?

This thread seems to have got woefully off-topic. I think the aim of this blog entry was to highlight the new 'Topics' feature, but from a content perspective (what is available through it, how it showcases material from the BBc and in future other providers do). That's why there's an entry on this 'editorial' blog, and a more 'techie' one describing how it's put together over on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Internet blog.

Pete seems to have chosen the China topic as an example because there's a lot of content on this one at the moment, because of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's focus on China this year both through news and features. It's just an example to illustrate what the topics feature does, so shouldn't we be talking about what we want to see on the topic pages do, rather than focusing on what content is in this one particular example? Even disregarding that point, I also find it curious that people posting here, claiming to want more transparency of coverage, in-depth coverage etc, have chosen to criticise something which is attempting to make information easier to find. In this case, the medium is the message - we're talking about ways to find coverage and content, not our opinions on that content!

So - I think that the topics feature is a promising start - with the web expanding, and content proliferating, it's becoming more important to be able to navigate through it to find the information you want. I'd like to see links to other sites' content on a particular topic, and eventually I'd love as a user to be able to type in my own topic, however obscure, and for a page to dynamically generate on that topic.

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