The 'Interactive God'

Quite possibly the most stirring intoduction I have ever heard from any speaker, anywhere. But after the worshipper cleared, I saw him. Standing, deity-like in the Birt Acres Room of Cardiff University's Bute Building, was the 'Interactive God' himself. His almightiness, Pete Clifford. I mean, Clifton. Pete Clifton. (Why do I keep wanting to call him Clifford?)

He is Lord of BBCi so actually quite important. And very interesting. He even swears, i sense a theme here. And sounds a bit like Ricky Gervais when he speaks.

In charge of 400 employees, 200 of which are journalists. He takes (well not actually himself) 50p of the £126.50 licence fee, which I don't think is THAT much. Not when you consider the 4 million users a day. 20 million on a 'busy day' like 7/7. BBCi learnt, I'm told, from the mistakes of 9/11 when the site crashed because too many people wanted to get the BBC's version of events.

And that's what it's all about. The BBC as a brand. People want to use the BBC site because of it reputation here and abroad. Clifton was surely onto a winner when he took the job anyway? A website that has guaranteed income (none of this google adds that the Telegraph man has to justify) and a brand that is already respected, and trusted, around the world.

There is still lots to be done of course. And lots that has been done, as demonstrated by the coverage of 7/7 shows. The day that London blew up was also a big day for the BBC. BBCi had 20,000 emails, 1,000 photos, 3,000 texts and 20 videos of the events sent in by Jo Public (he gets everywhere) that had to be sorted through and then used on all BBC outlets. The lead package on the 6 o'clock news on July 8th was made up entirely of viewers' material. It's all part of this User Generated Content concept- where news is made up of what the viewers send in. The NUJ (National Union of Journalists) certainly don't like it. It puts journalists out of a job.

It's clever, but possibly a bit lazy? At least it's something to be balanced. Something that the BBC are careful to do, assures Clifton. He says there have been several hoaxes and people who think they are helping by forwarding agancy pictures. And these people aren't paid for their material, at least not by the BBC. But it's something that Clifton wants to encourage. This 'call to action' will be unmissable to consumers of the BBC (they are consumers: listening, watching and reading). He hopes the 'how you can send us your material' message will be on the website welcome banner, the end of the TV news and anyother place that people get the BBC.

There's nothing wrong with advertising, or brand awareness as this seems to be, but I do feel uncomfortable with some of the other developments that Clifton predicts.

• BBC cracking the mobile phone as a medium for news output. That would get the otherwise hard-to-reach audience of young people. Ok- but what's wrong with newsround?
• More 'public space screens'. Like stations, shopping centres etc. Right- fine, but at the moment these are limited. The one at Victoria is particularly irritating if you have to sit there for an hour, as I so often do, after missing a train.
• Merging together TV news output, particularly News 24 with the website, to make it properly interactive. Something that will happen, says Clifton, within the next 10 years.
• Improving the personalised news system (I forget its technical name). This is where website users can choose the type of news that they recieve.

It's the last 2 that I have the biggest problem with. If people can choose exactly the type of news they want when they want, there would be little need for a tradition style news bulletin at a set time and with a set running order.

This in turn would mean that people would know less, not more about the world around them. Clifton said himself it's the entertainment stories that get the most hits of the site. It would destroy the potential of 'the news' to show it's viewers/listeners/readers things that they hadn't heard about before. Areas that they had no idea about ould stay a mystery because they are replaced with populist stories. Of course this is a huge debate about the role of journalists as educators or informers. I subscribe to the latter view, but I do feel that sometimes people might want guiding.

The other problem is that if you offer people too much, they become spoilt for choice and turned off. Sometimes you just cannot be bothered to make a decision. How many times have you attempted to watch sky or cable and given up after 5 minutes of trawling through the channels?

The truth is it wouldn't be this bad. There is no rush to get rid of the BBC's age old reputation as Auntie, educating and informing. But it is worth considering the extreme and hypothetical end of these developments. Let's not lose the basic aim providing people with news with what is going on in the world.

Food For Thought

I have come to Cowbridge food festival with an empty tummy and an even emptier wallet- a painful combination.
There's a stall selling organic free-range lamb, next to one promoting a trendy fair-trade vegan bistro. And then there's the man who makes award winning garlic chutney while living in a caravan parked on a field where he also organises illicit raves, or 'freedom parties' as he describes them to me.
It doesn't smell as inviting as the other sections and I can feel the familiar sense of cynicism creep back. I expect there'll be the Indian head massages to refocus my mental health and a miracle weight reduction pill made from the extracts of a root plant grown only in the mountains of Outer Mongolia.
But the first thing I see is a man surrounded by 2-300 small pots, a messy pile of home-printed leaflets and 4000 bees in a wire cage.
He is John Drakes of Beelief. His business is Apitherapy - using products of honeybees to heal people.
I grasp the fist pot I come to. 100mls of small gray granules, not unlike bisto.
Pollen he tells me, nature's best multi-vitamin with 6 times the protein of a beef steak.
And then there's various skin-care products made of honey, or of wax, or of both.
I look at bee-lief's logo. It's a friendly looking bee sitting on a pink flower. It looks like the sort of character that my Grandma would have on one of her coasters. I think of her now, crippled with Rheumatoid Arthritis as the bee man tells me of all the magic potions, he has.
The thing she needs is bee venom, apparently. It sounds remarkable unpleasant. Surely bee venom is poisonous?
Beeman has answered these questions before. People with auto-immune diseases, like Rheumatoid Arthritis have a pathological immunity to bee venom.
Bee venom contains more than 40 active substances, some of which haven't been studied yet.
I must look confused.
He is not to be out off though, explaining, in intricate detail, the chemical composition of these miracle substances.
It really does work, he implores, reciting anecdotes of cured sufferers.
It sounds to good to be true, and for my grandma, it is.

Bee venom therapy amounts to bee man stinging you 400 times, 3 times a week for how ever long it takes.


Somehow I can't imagine my Grandma allowing bee man to sacrifice 1200 bees a week on her. Perhaps the indian masseur can help.

Surfing the net with Kim Hollamby

Thursday's magical mystical guest lecture was with Kim Hollamby, head of IPC Media. A Time Warner owned company. Like so many companies these days...

IPC publishes magazines, you've guessed it, on the internet. The information super-duper highway as he explained. It runs sites for 85 magazines with famous titles ranging Yachting Monthly to 4x4 Magazine. Oh, and most interesting for me, the NME.

The third week of guest speakers and I can sense a pattern here. Again, Hollamby reaffirmed that yes, writing for the web was different to usually features writing, and yes, audience reach/ figures were on the up and yes, it's a great media to get in to.

So what was remarkable about this lecture then? Well, my phone started working again after a week of silence. In fact it started singing it's merry pick-me-up power ballad about 10 minutes into the lecture. No-one else seemed to share in my joy. The second thing is that I wrote most of my notes in shorthand. So apolgies if this entry gets a bit confusing. The word appalled and appealed are the same outline, what can i say?

And let's be fair, Kim Hollamby was a good speaker. Ok, the main thread of what he said was similar to the BBC Wales Online Ed and the Telegraph Online Ed, ie. Online is great, watch out for it in the not-so-distant-future.

But he approached it from a different angle. Magazines. (That's a great outline.) And his experiences of how well they fit on the internet. It does sound like he hasn't always had an easy relationship with his computer. He just learnt how to do website stuff (as he called it) on the job. Or, in his case, on the sea. He was baptised into the church of the Onlineism after he persuaded his employers that as editor of Yachting World (as he was at the time), he should be allowed to write an online journal while floating around on a boat for a while. 147 days to be precise.

Apparently it was experiment because, he argued, the magazine had become to London based (tho quite how a magazine about boats can be too London, I'm not quite sure. But stay with with, it's a good point). By going round the country, he could engage with his audience, and suddenly everything became interactive. People could write back and comment on his journey as he did it.

And there it comes, an online favourite. Immediacy. Hollamby could log his adventures almost as they happened. But doesn't immediacy go totally against what magazines are all about? It's true that magazines are not immediate, particularly when the are sometimes published only once a month. But that's where a website can work well with a magazine. A clearer relationship perhaps than that of newspapers and their websites. A magazine can provide the retrospective in-depth analysis (as Hollamby called it) while the wedsite can provide uptodate (Don't think that phrase is usually one word- but it is in shorthand) news. A impressive all-round package.

Of course you have to be careful of not dublicating with the website. Then no-one would by the magazine. Equally tho, you've got to give more than just soundbites on the website, so that it's not a waste of time for the person the the other end of the keyboard. The important point, noted Hollamby, is to think about where the consumer (in the case of specialist magazine, that's often the same person- there is a bigger crossover of readers than on newspapers) wants to read each each medium. Ie. The website for 5 minutes at lunch time in the office, and the magazine actually on the yacht. It's easier then to work out work content to furnish each with. The most relevant example of this I can think of that doesn't include boats (well not very often) is the Economist magazine and website.

Conclusions then. Well, the internet's the future isn't it. Nothing new there then.

richard.burton.co.uk/nonotthatone

No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space. No one could have dreamed that we were being scrutinized as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets. And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, they drew their plans against us... (From Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds, first broadcast in 1938)

Richard Burton read that in the most famous recital of the HG Wells' classic. It reminds me of being a terrified small child sitting by my Dad's LP player. I have a similar feeling when people start talking about how the internet is going to take over our world. There is nothing we can do to resist it and I suspect the common cold won't help.

The Richard Burton that came to talk to us was not the Welsh born beau who married Elizabeth Taylor. His voice was not as hypnotic as his namesake, but Richard Burton of telegraph.co.uk ('the first national newspaper to go online'- no less) had a lot to say. He started at the very beginning (what a very good place to start) and explained that the home page of the telegraph.co.uk is not the same as the hard copy of the newspaper. Obvious stuff perhaps, but I hadn't really thought about it. If you want to go to the electronic repliquer of the newspaper you have you click on the 'news' page. This may seem obvious for those aufait with t'internet, but I think it's an interesting example of how Newspapers and their website offspring diverge. As Burton was so keen to point out (and, well, boast about), the website bit has the up-to-the-minute news. In essence then it renders the hard-copy page obsolete. Why bother finding out about the newspaper, when you can be up to date with the latest news on the website homepage?

From what Burton was saying, he does harbour much affection for newspapers. He looks and speaks like an old hack, wearing a suit with no tie and occasionally saying 'fuck'. He is an old hack, having written for the clunky hard-copy version of the Telegraph in his earlier days. He clearly has much respect for the art of newspaper writing, referring to his job as online editor, certainly when he started, as simply a game and a stop-gap until he could find a job on a good ol' fashioned newspaper again. But then he alludes to just how important he thinks online news now is. He says he works for a digital publisher that "also makes newspapers."

Cutting. But you can see why he thinks it. A three 'i'd monster, the website can be described as instantaneous, interactive and infinite, says Burton, qualities that newspapers don't share.

'Instantaneous', because breaking stories can be put up on the 'ticker'- the feature that flashes one-sentence headlines across the top of every page on the site. Here Burton reiterates what Amanda Powell said last week- that online news shares its immediacy with Broadcast.

It's 'Interactive' because of the various UGC (Get me with my jargon- that's User Generated Content for you uneducated) that the site hosts. (If User Generated Content still means nothing- that's those pages titled 'Have your say' or something similar) Importantly though, this area is moderated because these pages are still subject to the same libel laws as the rest of the newspaper. So even if it is Jo Public's opinion that is defamatory, the paper can still get nailed. Interestingly, the BBC has apparently just taken the decision to not moderate their pages. Looking forward to those fireworks...

Finally, Burton described it as infinite. By that he means that there is no limitation for space and background info that so constrains both newspaper and broadcast. Although online news-writing still needs to be snappy, there is massive scope for link pages and in-depth pieces on a similar subject.

What I liked about Burton was that he cut the crap and talked about what all this technology stuff is all about- money money money. He gave examples of the google program- a deal worth £300 000- that scan any given article, then it puts supposedly relevant adverts next to the article. This has caused problems, like with the Auschwitz article being accompanied with a series of ads for ovens. There are some things that these computers just can't get right.

He also talked about the text service. Something that I am usually a bit dubious of- they cost 25p a go and make you phone beep as if you were the most popular person earth. I found his description of the text alert service slightly sinister. He said that he thought 'Telegraph should be able to tap you on the shoulder' and tell you the latest breaking news. He promised that this news is carefully chosen so as not to 'waste your time'. It raised the question to me; do you really need to know the news ALL the time? I have just watched the final episode of 'The Thick of It'.... wonderful political satire. In it the minister asks his secretary to call his wife and tell her the reasons he will be late home. "She doesn't watch rolling news" he explains, "she's a normal person".

If I could afford the 25p per go, I would subscribe to said service. But that's because I am moving into a profession which requires a degree of news junkyism. I can't see text message news catching on as a viable news medium on a large scale- but I suppose it's a good money spinner.

So the moral of this particular story is that Online news is just finding its feet. It is already a massive medium for news consumption and has good potential to make a massive amount of money. Advertisers can reach a boundless audience. But does online threaten the traditional area of the newspaper? No says Burton, because Online news is becoming the 'browsing' medium, whereas newspapers are about 'reading'. A subtle difference, but one that explains why we shouldn't lose faith in newspapers just yet.

Getting Online

Right, it may have taken 3 weeks, but I am here, full of life, inspiration and vocabulary. And the catalyst for this flash of activity? The fact that I got an extra hour in bed last night. Oh yeah, and that Amanda Powell, Editor of BBC Online Wales (or BBC Wales Online or maybe even Online BBC Wales...) very kindly gave up her Thursday morning and came to chat to us, 'the aspirational ones' of Cardiff Uni's Journalism school.

And she did give us all something to think about. As part of the broadcast department of 'the aspirational ones', I thought that online journalism wouldn't have much to do with me. It's just newspapers without the paper isn't it?

Well no actually. In fact it's an interesting hybrid of Newspaper and Broadcast. As with all mutants, it has taken the best component parts from both parents. It has the immediacy and accessibility (well nearly, I imagine people have greater access to a computer connected to the internet than to a newsagent) of Broadcast news and the style of Print news (I mean style in the sense that it tends to include adjectives and the king of literary devices- the subordinate clause. I am currently struggling with the idea that Broadcast news needs to be stripped down to the most basic grammar.)(Or should that be basic-est?)

It was interesting to hear some of Amanda's statistics the BBC site. A staggering 20-25 million hits to the BBC website everyday. That might be the same person logging on more than once, but that's still nearly half the individuals that live in the UK. And unlike most broadcast news, people are logging on to look at it, it's not just on in the background as a TV or radio might be. Most of these people are logging on between 11am- 2pm. That's when America wakes up and we have lunch. Apparently the reader will take in 2/3 on a web page what they will read in a newspaper.

And they want it quickly, as many readers will spend just 5 minutes on the site. If it takes too long to download, then the reader will give up. If the photo thumbnail is not engaging, the reader will give up. And if the topline of the healine and top-line, if it has one, are too clever and 'pun-y' then the reader will give up.

When you look at all these challenges, you realise just how right the BBC website has got it. There's a lot on the page at any one time, but it's not too cluttered that you can't wade through it and identify what you want to read.
And what I didn't know is that the first four paragraphs of any online story are used in Ceefax. So they've got to stand alone.

Of course there are still teething problems, as with all infants. For example there is the slightly alarming issue that articles can be retrospectively changed. That is, they can still be edited once they are posted. Journalists can effectively change their story after they have put it out. Some people would hint that this is dangerous, pointing to some kind of Orwellian society where archived news and records are altered and history is changed. In reality, I think this probably just helps journalists to get it right. Sometimes the facts are wrong and need to be changed. If you have an infinity of searchable news stories in your archive, it's the journalists duty to make sure that details are right.

The other point that Amanda made was the potential law problems with regards to court cases and what can and can’t be said before and after someone is charged. If jurors for example can access archived material during a court case then this could prejudice the trial.

With these issues in mind, it is interesting to see what ‘teeth’ this infant news source will produce. There is speculation that Online News will devour its newspaper parent within 10 years. But didn’t they say that about the wireless?

after all that I have nothing to write

But it's ok, because I have learnt how to do pictures. AND what better picture than the lady herself...

It's Fraeulein Maria: