That I agree with. But to a certain extent communities take a long time to develop and even then CIF is so large and concentrated in one place that its near impossible to do that. But there are changes planned

The drive-by-commenting scenario is certainly true. I try and avoid that here but it happens all the time.

I take your point about Have Your Say and reservations about its format. Most of the negativity unfortunately seems to stem from perceived censorship or moderation for quality. Comment is free also suffers from what i once heard Lee Bryant (from http://www.headshift.com/) call “drive by commenting” and still struggles with either developing community or maintaining quality via comment threads.

However the BBC’s *does* engagement in more ways than just Have Your Say. Comments and links via numerous blogs, communities such as 606, message boards such as Today, Five Live and the long running (and well hosted) Archers, and increasingly spaces away from bbc.co.uk on sites such as Flickr, Last FM and YouTube.

When judging the BBC and engagement then have a look beyond the Have your Say forums.

who are these “loons” of which Anna and others speak ??

I wrote recently about how large organisations may be able to reach out to bloggers to promote conversations in the public interest, and the sensitivites involved. Here’s some news of a project along those lines that I and colleagues been…

I can tell you why we (the BBC Trust) didn’t invite Biased BBC and it had nothing to do with conspiracy or other “loons” of any political hue

What the Trust is trying here is a pilot, a toe in the water as it were – and as such the numbers we could invite were limited by default.
We tried to invite a range of bloggers and in fact had only 2 truly political ones (excuse me if I miscategorise anyone) – Sunny and Slugger O’Toole, with some interesting debate on the size of political blogging within the wider blogosphere and the importance of impartiality to the scope of the debate.

I think our main criterion was to have people willing to consider how governance and accountability to licence fee payers can be improved by the involvement of blogs and bloggers. If the underlying review was about impartiality Biased BBC would be top of our invitee list.

We will be holding another event later on in the process, I hope, which should have a much wider invitee list (assuming they turn up!) – any blogger who feels they’d have a useful thing or thousand to say, or online engagement ideas to share would be more than welcome to attend that.

Incidentally, the pilot is both about online engagement by the BBC Trust and the service review of bbc.co.uk I’m currently running. Feel free to look it up on the BBC Trust website (very old net). The issues we’re looking at may sound dry but go to the core of what BBC does online.

And I’d never dream of imagining some Greek wine would result in any cannons being spiked.

You have to admire the brass neck of a man who can bemoan the loonies that inhabit the (D)HYS forums on the BBC website in the same articl……

This blog , which I like , is most atypical of the blogasphere . I imagine what they are trying to do is to spike the guns of the growing revolt against thei arrogant paternilist assumptions .

It will not work no matter how many puppets perform. This organisation is beyone reform and if you were in any doubt you shouod have seen the Politics show which was devoted to anti Ashcroft propoganda. Hardly a mention of Union money or the Communications allowance so abused by Labour. There followed a deathly hushed romp around the care probalme refferring to “Government money “throughout but misrepresenting the problme along usual lines .
For afters it was thicko Lammy by which time I was writhing in agony .

“But let’s focus on the BBC’s interaction with the blogosphere rather than on its left-wing / right-wing bias.”

You know that you put in the Dave Hill bit at the end just to wind us critics of the BBC up. I agree with you though that for the BBC, interactive does not necessarily mean better.

Pedantry (aka accuracy!) is my middle name.

“I remember seeing something on the Palestinian peace process there yesterday. I assume that is what is being referred to here.”
But it isn’t just the “controversial” stuff is it – as I have pedantically pointed out?
My point is that the BBC will *never* be able to loosen up sufficiently – leaving aside (cf Ravi) whether this is something they should be doing at all.

Phew! Sensitive or what?!!

Like wow, pedantic or what? I remember seeing something on the Palestinian peace process there yesterday. I assume that is what is being referred to here. But well done on that little point you managed to score ChrisC. Must be well proud of yourself.

Or rather they wanted a cosy little club of BBCophiles to reinforce their existing prejudices.

We sat around smoking cigars and drinking wine and plotting how to further destroy the right. I don’t know if that’s what you’re referring to Morgoth.

Who should lead the LibDems?
Should there be more 20mph speed limits?
Are the middle classes drinking too much?

Phew! Sensitive or what?!!

i.e. interesting issues!

Thanks for the write up.

There’s a misconception (I work at the BBC in the bit that deals with this) that the BBC pre-moderates comments for all of of its website. In fact over 1m text comments are published on the BBC site via Have Your say or our message boards every month “live to the server” being dealt with by usually reactive moderation (user alerts us to an issue).

Have Your Say have also started to adopt reactive moderation for their forums over the last year or so but you’re right they are still pre-moderating around sensitive issues. However forums devoted to 606, 5 Live, Today don’t pre-moderate their comments.

Also interaction on bbc.co.uk is a bit more than HYS.

That said should the BBC’s role be to link and curate conversation as opposed to actually hosting it. Increasingly we’ve started to do the former (although only in pockets. Trying to aggregate blog posts is something we’re looking at in a number of ways).

Anyway an interesting thread. Thanks for everyone’s contribution.

Because they wanted to avoid conspiracy loons?

Er, you started it!

Ravi’s comments sound very sensible.
Is this yet another example of the BBC feeling it has to do *everything*.
And of course it will never be able to do “blogging” if every comment has to be moderated in advance.
The most ludicrous aspect of “Have Your Say” is the stats, with hundreds sometimes thousands of comments “awaiting moderation”.
People aren’t put off by the “loony” comments – those are the ones which readers tend to recommend as far as I can see.
People are put off by the lack of interaction.

If they want to use blogs as a source of feedback – that’s not a bad idea. How surprising that they did not invite BiasedBBC to your cosy get-together!

Or you can post it to your Facebook or save o del.icio.us

Riz – haha, love it.

keep those ideas coming folks! But let’s focus on the BBC’s interaction with the blogosphere rather than on its left-wing / right-wing bias.

“They also wanted us to suggest ways in which the corporation could better engage with blogs or do stuff on their own website that would help more people to participate. In coming up with practical solutions, we barely had any time left so it was quite difficult. Do you folks have any solutions (they’ll be reading this)?”

I think the BBC should try to focus on maintaining its integrity as a neutral news source, with investigative reporting, and not following anyone’s political agenda. Something that once was called journalism. Traditional media in Britain is highly polarised and I don’t think it is a good thing. If I want opinions (which are biased) on a particular subject I go to blogs, not to get my news. So why would I want to get opinions from my news source?

If the BBC wants to tap on blogs, why doesn’t it outsource it to… well-established blogs? It could automatically aggregate posts from different blogs that relate to a particular news story and provide a portal for people to participate in those blogs (sort of like news.google.com). Since blogs are external to the site, there is no danger of people becoming alienated by fringe comments that sometimes dominate in the BBC “Have your say” forums.

Douglas Clark – very sensible

Dave Hill – excellent – keep it up. Only a few thousand more examples and you might catch up with BiasedBBC’s tally of left-wing bias!

the problem the BBC has if it it tries to do anything, it will have media commentators, politicians, the lot, jumping on them.

of course they want to be seen to be having ‘participatory’ discussions with ’stakeholders’ – i.e. the people they consider to be ‘opinion leaders’.