Boing Boing showcases a new idea from Stef Magdalinski - who brought you They Work For You among others.
Mr Magdalinski takes the BBC News website, and puts it through a grinder that adds Wikipedia links to the terms in the article. If you're not sure what I mean, here's an original story, and this is the Magdalinski version.
Mr Magdalinski talks about the project in his blog.
News Online doesn't engage with its users, it doesn't provide tools that allow me, the licence payer, to slice and dice their stories, and by refusing to link from its body text, it fails to understand how hypertext works.
Also, with its conservative link policy [...], that only connects the BBC to established brands, it snubs the wider web, the great teeming mass of creativity. Patrician is not authoritative. Aloof is not respected. Conservative and fearful is not engaging.
Finally, by not really allowing user interaction or commenting, News Online forces that debate and activity away from its site, and out onto the wild wild web.
The BBC site has become one of the web's main reference sites, so Mr Magdalinski is clearly right to say that web users should be able to slice and dice its content. The wikiproxy is a great place to start, and its users should be grateful for Mr Magdalinski's work.
However, I don't agree that the BBC should allow user interaction or commenting on its pages. There are two reasons for this.
First, the BBC should not damage the brand of its impartiality. For all that Mr Magdalinski is right to worry about aloofness, user interaction can be the death of impartiality on a website. Comments on an article reveal the prejudices of the site's readers - and though a process of second-guessing, can imply the biases of the sites readers/supporters. I don't mean that the BBC will see user comments going in a particular direction, and then slant the stories accordingly. But a slew of back-and-forth comments between partisans of various colours will be confused by some with the content or views of the site, and even for sophisticated readers will become an annoying distraction.
Take Downing Street Says. This site, which puts online the Downing Street lobby brief, is a very useful web resource, but the comments area has been colonised by a few comment-makers, of whom 90% or more do nothing but parrot the usual saloon-bar rubbish about how worthless and evil politicians are. Will this change? Perhaps, and I hope it will, but the site is less likely to attract new comment-makers, given the tone of debate that new users will see. Comments pages too easily turn into Usenet - a wonderful conversation going on, but in a room full of people shouting abuse at the tops of their voices.
The second reason that the BBC should not add more interactivity to its website is that it has to appeal to a large cross-section of people, and people in an unfamiliar environment need to have things presented to them in a familiar format. No-one would expect Slashdot to move into publishing its posts on paper once a day. The Slashdot user interface is well-suited for the people who use it, and their level of web sophistication. The BBC's web offering has to appeal to everyone from Cory Doctorow to my mother. Cory might get what the user interaction is for, and be able from long practice to screen out the insane rantings of partisans on the comments page. My mum, however, would throw her hands up in horror, and never return.
Working PERL magic with the BBC site is an excellent way of extending it for the techno-literate. Mr Magdalinski is right to say that it is a good way to work with the BBC's content. But the main BBC site itself needs to be kept clear, simple and free from user comments or notes on a story. If we want to debate its content, we have the rest of the web to do it on.
11:05:49 PM 
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