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Whisky

Listed below are comments made by Whisky between Friday, 28th November 2008 and Friday, 13th March 2009.

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How do you illustrate the absence of God? 05:53am on 13 Mar 2009 Oh, come on Ashley, you of all people should have been able to come up with the perfect picture to visualise the absence of God...

What was wrong with a picture of a Babel Fish?
Points Of View Message Board 3: Football or Rugby? 12:36pm on 07 Jan 2009 >>>Nick said:

loudGeoffW - its very good if 6music presenters are engaging with listeners on the 6music message boards.

The question is why isn't this happening on the POV boards?

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Oh my god, that's classic! Sorry, up to now I've tried to be constructive in my comments, but this is just the final straw!

Nick, why on earth are you asking us this question?

You say YOU are responsible for the POV boards and YOU repeatedly refuse to use them to engage with your users - preferring your blogs.

If YOU, who have accepted responsibility for these boards, refuse to use them, why do you think anyone else within the BBC should bother?

Why are you asking US why YOU are not doing your job.
Points Of View Message Board 3: Football or Rugby? 5:03pm on 18 Dec 2008 -------------------
So far these boards have not brought me as much good information which is relevant to my job as my automated blog searches and other feeds and aggregators.
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Two points there.... Firstly, information you get from blogs, feeds and aggregators is going to be skewed by the fact that the people blogging, using twitter, etc. are in generally going to be more technically minded.

Yes, you will get information from them (and, on average, it'll be written with more technical acumen). But, are users of those media really a representative sample of the BBC's client base?

When you've a TV programme called Points of View, and a messageboard clearly visible to the public, with the same name, it could be the perfect tool for attracting the 'general public' who have something to say.

Second point...

No, it won't return as much 'useful information per word posted' as your twitter feeds and blogs, but considering the information on there is from a wider range of posters than you'll ever get using Twitter or a Blog then you'll get a far more representative sample of 'non-technical' opinions...

Of course now we run into Catch 22 - as in order to get this information from a messageboard, it needs to be managed and hosted effectively.

Both sources of information have their uses, by dismissing one completely you are effectively ignoring what has the potential to be an excellent source of information...

Your call - the easy way out - look at your existing sources or put the effort in to developing what could be a far more representative source.

Feeling lazy or feeling ambitious?
Points Of View Message Board 3: Football or Rugby? 3:47pm on 18 Dec 2008 Quick point to "PR1811"

Were you aware that the messageboard software used across the BBC already has the facility to let you subscribe to boards, forums, etc. and view them via RSS feeds?

And whilst I agree that blogs can be interesting, where do you go if you want to make a specific point at a specific time if there's no appropriate blog to post to?
Points Of View Message Board 3: Football or Rugby? 3:32pm on 18 Dec 2008 Right, a short response to this blog.

Your whole blog seems to be based upon the fact that blogs are easier to control thus less frightening to BBC employees and better for achieving targetted responses to specific questions.

That may well be. But the problem is... How do you know what questions to ask?

BBC staff firing out blogs from their ivory towers may be interesting and useful to the bloggers themselves, but they leave very little leeway for your customers to express what _they_ consider important.

Messageboards, on the other hand, give your customers the ability to bring subjects to your attention that you may not otherwise have considered.

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On a few of the specific points you made in your blog...

"so far on the POV boards the amount of time I've spent deleting off topic threads has outweighed the times I think I've started a useful conversation."

A little rich considering that in the five weeks you've been using the POV messageboards the only conversations I've seen you start are to point people towards blogs you've written...

Condemning us before the trial?

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"People complain that the BBC is "faceless". At least on a blog you get a name, an up to date job title and a photograph."

I'm slightly disappointed that you're unaware of the capabilities of the software you're using... The messageboard software used by the BBC is fully capable of providing exactly that functionality... It's just that it has been turned off for some reason.

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Then there is a series of comments...

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"2. People complain that the BBC doesn't respond to comments. BBC people are more likely to respond to comments on a blog, particularly if its one they've written themselves. I'd single out Andy Quested as one good example, but there are others here, here and here."

"...the fact that BBC people can start and control the topics on a blog that makes them more likely to participate. "

"People who comment have less freedom on a blog than the blog owner. But in return there's more chance of a useful result, of the blog owner participating and actually giving you answers."

and

"One of the questions I am asking is "what are the Points of View boards supposed to do?""

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To answer your last question with regard to the previous statements...

The PoV boards are an excellent method of gathering information on what your customers actually want you to ask questions about...

Ask your questions on a blog if you want to... But without something like the messageboards, there's no practical way of judging what your customers actually want to discuss.

You need one for the other to have any real relevance to your customer base.

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Next, a question for you...

Why on earth are you a host on the PoV messageboards?

What I've said in this post has been said to you many times over the last fortnight or so.
I myself have posted similar explanations several times but have never had an acknowledgement, and all I can draw from the tone and content of this final blog is that you've totally disregarded/ignored everything I've said to date.

If you, and the hierarchy of the BBC, feel safer within the protected confines of your blogs, so-be-it... But unless you want those blogs to remain completely divorced from the reality of what your customers want, you need some practical method of interacting with them on the subjects _they_ wish to have discussed. The perfect medium for that is the messageboard system.

By all means - operate a two-tier system where the BBC garners information via the messageboards to feedback into the hierarchy who can then explore issues in-depth from the safety their blogs.

Unfortunately, this means that _someone_ within the BBC has to read the messageboards and feed that information back to the people who can deal with it. Someone within the BBC has to point the customers asking these questions towards the appropriate blog (if it exists)... Someone has to manage the board on a day to day basis.

All these tasks are the work of a messageboard host, and quite frankly, given that your comments have been completely negative towards the boards and the job of running them, complaining about having to spend time deleting threads, etc., then I find myself questioning whether you should have taken on the role yourself at all...

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If the BBC wants to provide an effective way for their customers to ask questions, the messageboard is the perfect medium.

Messageboards require management.

If you are unwilling to do that work, give the job to someone else!
Is it safe to Explore? 4:29pm on 16 Dec 2008 One point that a lot of people missed...

It's all very well telling people they're idiots for using IE and not installing Firefox. But there are a lot of users out there who haven't the choice.

A lot of IT departments in large companies deliberately stop their users from installing software themselves, so they're stuck with whatever their IT department has given them.

And don't worry... Once Firefox gets above about 30-40% of the global internet traffic then it'll be worth the virus writers' effort to work on its security flaws.

At the moment, the only real safety in Firefox (or any other 'alternative' browser) is not the fact that they are more secure, it's just that they're a smaller target than IE.
How Can We Improve Commenting Across BBC Online? 09:11am on 30 Nov 2008 1) Integrate blog comments and messageboard postings under a single system, letting users track their comments from a single page

2) Provide a 'my comments' zone on the BBC Homepage

3) Improve formating of BBC Blog comments (maximum number of postings shown on a page)

4) Improve the page layout of blogs, the fixed width setting is far too narrow for today's screen definitions

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All of these could be created by migrating the blogs onto a dedicated DNA-run site.
Points of View Message Board 2: Off Topic and Off Site 09:32am on 29 Nov 2008 Nick Reynolds said...

"When I have a plan or made a decision, I will of course tell you about it."

Oh boy! How to win friends and influence people...

Personally I'm hoping that was just a dodgy bit of phrasing, unfortunately, what's written on sites like this tends to come back and haunt you for years to come.

As I linked to earlier, there are some wonderful articles on the hub about communications and transparency when interacting with the public via the web.

One of the important bits is to keep your users involved... If you come up with a plan and tell your users what you're going to do as a fait-accompli, then you're asking for trouble needlessly...

As I said earlier, I hope I'm wasting my time here and you think I'm stating the obvious... But, unfortunately, from this side of the screen it doesn't appear that way.

Ok, we all know that the buck stops with you, you have the power to do whatever you like with the sites. But, if you want to keep an existing community and your existing users happy, instead of coming up with a plan and telling us about it, come up with a plan and talk to us about it... We might be able to help you, come up with additional ideas that you can't see from your side of the screen...

On a slightly different note, this blog is becoming, quite frankly, unusable and unreadable in its current format, so I doubt I'll be posting much more.

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Possible hints at improving the blog format to make it more useable for high levels of traffic and user comments...

1) Blogger has the sole rights to create an article.
2) Users can start separate conversations under that article
3) The conversations under the article have better functionalities... (20 posts to a page, quote function, etc.)
4) Users have a way of centralising any conversations they are involved in (including better navigation to individual posts)

Now, even if you agree with all four points there and have the budget to develop the blogging software to do all that... Hold your horses. Everything I've just described can be done under DNA and can be fully integrated into existing messageboards across the BBC. Talk to Jim Lynn.
Points of View Message Board 2: Off Topic and Off Site 2:46pm on 28 Nov 2008 Just as a quick aside to demonstrate the inflexibility of this style of blog...

Select this webpage, copy and paste it into a Word document - delete the extraneous page header information and all information apart from the postings - and this thread, if you printed it out, would be a 46 page document.

Easy to navigate? I think not!
Points of View Message Board 2: Off Topic and Off Site 1:37pm on 28 Nov 2008 -----------
I don't have responsibility for any other message boards. (I do have responsibility for h2g2 so your comments about that are also useful as I am thinking about that too)
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Ooops - that's probably the most frightening phrase I've ever read on the BBC website...

I'm not sure what you think of the previous postings I've made on this blog and on the equivalent POV thread. But _please_, if you're thinking about doing anything to h2g2 - come and join us, spend some time using the site. Remember that that particular community has roots that go back nearly 10 years and its ethos pre-dates ownership by the BBC.
There are still a few members of the BBC staff around various departments who came across from The Digital Village, ask their opinions... And posting a blog entry asking for opinions on h2g2 is likely to start a virtual, on-line riot.

Those articles on the hub I kept linking to were, in the main, written by the people who created h2g2 in the first place... They know what they're talking about - honestly.

I'm trying not to feel negative about this. I honestly hope I'm actually making a fool of myself here and 'teaching my grandmother to suck eggs' as they say. If I am, I apologise, but h2g2 is a very unique corner of the internet, building itself up into a social networking site years before facebook and myspace came along, and developing an on-line knowledge base years before wikipedia came into being (and it's a lot more accurate and less open to abuse). Treat it gently, please!

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