In a few days’ time, on April 30, the BBC will close down its experiment in grassroots democracy, the Action Network. The project started life five years ago as BBC iCan. According to the people involved at the time, iCan was a significant change for public service broadcasting because it was about encouraging people to get involved rather than sitting back and watching politics happen. In a farewell note, the

Image via WikipediaJeremy Paxman, the presenter of the BBC’s flagship news and current affairs show, Newsnight, reveals his feeling about user-generated content and engaging with the audience, with his pay-off at the end of the programme: …on the website along with our editor’s pathetic pleas for you to send some of your old bits of home movies and the like so that we can become the BBC’s version of Animals

Regular visitors to the homepage BBC News website were in for a surprise on Monday as they fired up their browsers. The site has had a facelift and feels rejuvenated. Much of the navigation hasn’t changed but it is wider and uses white space so that stories have room to breathe. This is how editor Steve Herrmann described the changes: So our designers embarked on a mission that they have

The BBC News website is gearing up to unveil its new look which will include wider pages and bigger images, according to website editor Steve Herrmann. The current look dates back to 2003 and it is showing its age. After all, Internet time moves at a faster pace than regular time. But one of the most welcomed changes will be the use of Flash embedded video, rather than pop-ups in

The new guidelines from the BBC on social media are now available online. There are two parts to this, the first dealing with how the BBC should approach social networking sites and the second on how the use by BBC staff of social networking sites. The guidelines on the use of social media by the BBC reflects concerns about protecting the brand. But they also recognises that the corporation should

The BBC has finally started to roll out the use of embedded video in Flash, after a successful trial last year. The trial found, unsurprisingly, that people liked having the video as an embedded Flash file in story pages. One of the first stories to use the new player was a behind the scenes look at Google’s approach to office space on the BBC News website’s technology index. Up until

The CBC is facing a period of upheaval and uncertainty as it pushes ahead with plans to integrate its television, radio and online operations. The Tea Makers blog, run by an anonymous CBC staffer, raises some big questions about the process of bringing together the three mediums. It argues that while the idea may make sense on paper, it overlooks the differences between TV, radio and online in Canada: Radio

While I was in Boston at the Future of Science Journalism symposium at MIT, I dropped in to see my friend, Clark Boyd, technology correspondent on The World radio show and did a short video interview with him using an Nokia N95. That was after he interviewed me for his weekly technology podcast during which we talked about the Internet was changing the media landscape. The interview is available in

Clark Boyd is technology correspondent for The World, a coproduction of the BBC and WGBH, and funded by Public Radio International. I caught up with him in Boston to reflect back on his three years of podcasting and look ahead to the future of radio. [vodpod id=ExternalVideo.478889&w=425&h=350&fv=] Technorati Tags: BBC, WGBH, podcasting, technology

The BBC’s recent experiment with mobile journalism is a good example of its multimedia approach to news in action. Technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones headed out to the mobile phone industry’s annual shindig in Barcelona to cover the event for TV, radio and online. Given that cellphones were the focus, it proved a suitable event to try out using mobiles as newsgathering tools. The phone was a Nokia N95 which Reuters