Auntie’s bookmarks
Aug 17th, 2007 by handolio
Anyone looked at BBC News today? Stupid question really. You don’t need to see the site’s off-the-scale Social Meter score to know it’s one of the most authoritative on the internet, even if its writers still don’t know where to put an apostrophe.
The site’s lovable semi-literate fucknuttery remains intact, then, but the Beeb has finally followed the lead of newspapers like the Telegraph and, dear God, the Daily Mail by providing links to various bookmarking and social thumbs-up sites at the bottom of a story. Helpfully, there’s even a page explaining what the sites are for and how to use them.
All of which is interesting for two reasons. I find myself wondering to what extent the BBC is truly trying to engage with social communities, and what degree of payback it’s expecting from doing so. Even more interesting is the inclusion of a link to the Wikipedia page on Social Bookmarking. I’m sure Wikipedia doesn’t need the extra traffic these days, but it’s an interesting sign of how information, news and journalism are changing.
[...] wondered after the changes were made if the BBC’s new-found enthusiasm for social bookmarking extended to monitoring who was tagging its stories and what comments they were adding, so I decided [...]
[...] November 23, 2007 by handolio A while back, the BBC caused a ripple of excitement (at least for this blogger) when it started to furnish stories with social bookmarking links. [...]