P. S.: Post Scriptum

The BBC is present in 43 languages. Incredible I would say. What is more incredible are the naguages that are missing, more than the languages that are present. In particular for Europe we have:
Russian, Uckrainian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Slovene, Slovak, Albanian, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, Greek, and Turkish.

Impressive, isn’t it? And yet don’t you feel that we are missing something? I mean… what about French, German, Spanish, and Italian? Well, French is there. Just not in the European list but in the African one. As well as Portuguese and Spanish (which is called Mundo just to make things more interesting, but the url recites ‘/spanish/’) for Latin America. But there is not just a difference of language but of focus. So, for example, there are two edition in Portugese: Portuguese (focused on South America) Portugueseafrica (focused on Africa).

Still French, German, Spanish, and Italian are missing as BBC pages focused on Europe, while German and Italian are just missing, fullstop (Japanese is also missing from the Asia languages, but I am sure it is a coincidence!).

The question remains, why is it so? And I suppose that from a strictly economical point of view it makes sense for BBC to invest in opening up to nations where they will not find a big competition with local media. Also the people who would
choose BBC in those countries are generally people from a highly educated background that surf often on the Internet. In short people who have little problems in reading their news in English.

Yet it would bve so good to have this other possible source of news for media-controlled-Italy. In the meantime Euronews offers news in 7 european languages. A message that it might seem a small niche for the BBC but the request for european news in Italian, German, Spanish, and French is there.

Note: This entry is connected also to a mindmap. Some people were having problems in opening the page because of that. As such the mindmap has been stored in a separate page, and can be viewed from here.

Introduction

As correctly pointed out by Jeffrey Zeldman tag clouds are becoming more and more popular. Yet I keep seeing services which should be using tag clouds that keep on using tag sets. It is not just a problem of programming a tool which can only support tag sets, but also but also of programming tools which might in principles produce tag clouds, but such that the users are not invited to use a tag if one already exists, and as such don’t generate a tag cloud.

Example of the first type of tools are Flickr, 43things, consuMating, tagsurf ^* , example of the second is the tagged version of the BBC^* . In all those cases a tag set is used, where instead a tag cloud would be more appropriate. Some of the differences between a tag cloud and a tag set where explained in Vanderwal.net: Explaining and Showing Broad and Narrow Folksonomies. Let’s see them again, and see some consequences of those differences, which should clarify when is better to use one tool and when is better to use the other. Continue reading On Tag Clouds, Metric, Tag Sets and Power Laws

Some things are bound to happen. And they tend to happen at the right time. We have been using tags from years now, but the momentum have builded up, day after day. Always seeing more and more computer programs using them. Starting from deli.icio.us and flickr. Then 43 things.com, consumating.com, tagsurf.com and all the clones of the above (BTW if anybody can find me a small open source server program that emulates Flickr for personal use,I would be grateful). And of course technorati tags, and GutenTag that give rss feeds to technorati tag.
But something was missing. Somthing that some people might have noticed. The news were not playing with tags. News were still presented in the old top down way: politics, economics, international…
On Google News, as well as CNN. On Yahoo News, as on BBC.

But finally something is starting to move over there too.
Two services, pretty much at the same time were presented: Yahoo News with tags and BBC with tags.

But there are some serios differences between the two services. Yahoo content is being automatically indexed by a program, who imposes the tags according to what keywords are found in the text. As such Yahoo tags is a Top Down keyword classification of stories.

Instead (and here you can see the revolutionary spirit blowing through English news services), BBC program is a truly down up grassroot program. A program where everybody can add any tag to any article.
The difference is not a minor one, as in the first case it is the user that have to adapt to the world view of Yahoo, while in the second it is BBC that includes in his wider world view the user one. In a sense it is a case of Tagsonomy vs. Folksonomy, or
narrow folksonomy vs. broad folksonomy.

Of course both the program are still in their first days. Full of bugs, and of suggestion from us on how to make it better, smoother, and nearer to our personal desires.

Of course having anybody being able to add any tag to a copy of the BBC content is full of political dangers. What is stories about important politicians start to be tagged as ‘dictator’ or ‘wanker’. This is in fact inevitable, but politicians showld well use this as an indication of their popularity, than something to be changed.

At the moment anybody can add a tag in the BBC news page by login in as ‘guest’/'guest’. And already we have some people who have tagged some stories as ‘wanker. But if we go to delicious we see that nearly no one have used such epitome.

Why is that? My personal position is that people are more careful when tagging something for their own personal use. On delicious everybody have an account. And although you could have as many account you like, they cost. They cost time and memory to set it up. So we all tend to have just the minimum amount of acount needed. But on BBC, at the moment, only BBC person are allowed to have their own account. We normal human being, can just be guest. Ans as such we might feel deresponsabilized respect to what we wrote. So I think that, although the experiment is great, it will only work properly when everybody can set up his own account, and serch his account, or the account of another, well defined person.

Of course this also open up all sort of extra possibilities. After all, if anybody can tag any article with his own tags. Then to each article a set of tag will be defined. What is I want to receive (maybe on my mobile) all the articles tagged with a certain keyword. The possibilities are really endless.

And to look at those possibilities BBC had started a whole new project, called BBC Backstage where geeks are invited to collaborate with the staff of BBC to develop the API to permit to everybody to reuse the BBC material. Cross this with the fact tha much of this material is copyrighted with a copyleft copyright (copygotit?), and you see how the whole situation can positively explode.
Imagine, much of the material from BBC, offered for free, in the way wanted by the best geeks and hackers, to produce information in any noncommercial way they please.

Already many ideas are flowing? An RSS for the results from sport match. Crossing google maps with BBC News.

Possibility to have BBC news accepting trackbacks.

And many many others.

All this would mingle BBC with the common people. Think, all the news, mixed and remixed. Commented, trackbacked. Until you can read an article from BBC news from any device (through rss), in any format you want (through your rss reader). Filtered anyway you want (through folksonomy), and seeing the world response to that article(through trackback and comments).

Thank you BBC
(and no, I am not paid by BBC)

Thanks also Wired for some inspiration.