I’ve put this in subverted links but I can’t help myself wanting to post it now too… from the Guardian:
The BBC today unveiled radical plans to rebuild its website around user-generated content, including blogs and home videos, with the aim of creating a public service version of MySpace.com
Which sounds great, hell yeh says I, but something concerns me:
Mr Highfield’s presentation, Beyond Broadcast, outlined a three-pronged approach to refocus all future BBC digital output and services around three concepts – “share”, “find” and “play”.
He said the philosophy of “share” would be at the heart of what he dubbed bbc.co.uk 2.0.
Mr Highfield said the share concept would allow users to “create your own space and to build bbc.co.uk around you”, encouraging them to launch their own blogs and post home videos on the site.
Specifically it’s that this is like a nasty echo of the kind of hopelessly utopian ideals that Derek Powazek describes so well … I mean, doesn’t it just feel like optimistic, podcast-esque, web-bubblespeak? Aren’t we over the kind of ‘build your own space’, ‘share with other users’, ‘personal experience’ thing… I just wonder how much users / visitors will actually get out of this?
Heck, I could be totally wrong, they could be entirely on the button here and I certainly reckon that this is absolutely the right conversation to be having, but ‘share, find and play’ is to me too far removed from reality.
Why would you ‘share’? What would you want to ‘find’? And why would you bother to ‘play’?
Update: Marshall Kirkpatrick knows where to look for press releases :)
I just wrote about this on socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com too. I can understand your concerns, and I’ll be interested to see how it plays out. I imagine, though, that there are lots of folks who know the brand, want to manipulate some info, share with friends, etc. instead of email forwarding stories to everyone they know..and who don’t want to deal with the energy overhead of having their own blog elsewhere. That would make sense to me.
I kinda agree, and you’re dead right in considering the actual meaning of ‘share’ (especially in communication terms) – and they’ll probably be a ‘success’ based on the enormous traffic they already get – like msn spaces, couldn’t fail even though they did their best ;) But I think there’s also a fundamental misconception here, one of the reader as ‘producer’ – user I can handle… but not really producer.