´óÏó´«Ã½ Topics In Beta
I am delighted to announce the launch of ´óÏó´«Ã½ Topic Pages.
Topics are automatically updated web pages, each one covering a different person, country or subject.
This is a beta release so forgive us a few rough edges. They will be smoothed out over the course of the trial.
We wanted to make it as easy as possible to create and maintain pages for large countries as it is for small ones, whether they are currently the location of big news stories or not. Or to build pages for a politicians, famous people and historical figures that alert users to relevant programmes and news stories they might otherwise miss. Or to showcase the best and latest things the ´óÏó´«Ã½ has produced about topical issues, historical events, big organisations and popular hobbies. And we wanted to produce a page all aboutdogs.
So /topics uses a variety of search techniques to create feeds of the latest ´óÏó´«Ã½ content from news articles, programmes available to watch on iPlayer, weather forecasts, news videos, and information from the TV and radio schedules. ´óÏó´«Ã½ editors then add in hand-picked articles and features from around the ´óÏó´«Ã½ and other websites.
Stephen Betts of our technical team will post in the next few days giving more detail on how the feeds are generated and the pages assembled as well as giving an insight into the engineering approaches.
I will of course reply to your comments on a later post, but there are a couple of questions that I can answer up-front.
Why are we doing this?
While it is quite easy to find all the news about, say, or all on-demand programmes about India, it has always been more of a challenge to find everything the ´óÏó´«Ã½ has recently produced about a topic. Now we can make pages that organise the full range of ´óÏó´«Ã½ content around selected subjects like this and this.
And because the overhead involved in maintaining these pages is so low, we can cover many more subjects than we could using traditionally edited pages which had to be manually updated by a human being. As the feeds used in /topics are automatic, we can be confident that all the pages are bang up-to-date.
Finally, these pages will exist forever regardless of whether there is new content being produced about the subject (even if the odd page may look a little bare now and again). So, for the first time, it's possible to link to one permanent page for the topics that we cover on the ´óÏó´«Ã½. At the moment we have a selection, and the beta trial will help us determine the scope of what we might do in the future.
How do we choose which topics to cover?
We take three things into account. Firstly, what people are looking for (we do this by analysing the ´óÏó´«Ã½ search logs). Then, what we have content about (we aren't aiming to create an encyclopaedia of all human knowledge; rather to better organise and showcase our content) and lastly, the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s editorial priorities.
For the moment a few countries, people and subjects have been chosen to get things off the ground and to test the technology. The list will grow over the coming months.
If it's all automatic, what about editorial priorities and tone?
No new content is produced for our topic pages, so we know that everything we link to meets editorial guidelines. Topic page editors can also add and remove content if necessary.
´óÏó´«Ã½ journalists and content producers use their judgement to assess their importance of their stories and content every time they write a story or publish some content. We're working on systems that will capture that wisdom, infer the relative editorial importance of a piece of content (for instance by checking whether it appeared on the News or iPlayer homepages) and then use this information to influence the ordering of content on the pages.
Is it just going to be and iPlayer content on these pages?
Far from it. We are developing a ´óÏó´«Ã½ blogs feed and planning and other feeds. In addition, we are working on sourcing widgets of content from other areas of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ including things like the recipe database.
We are trying out some of these ideas on the topics page for China. Pete Clifton has blogged in more detail about China on the ´óÏó´«Ã½ News Editors Blog.
What about related content from other websites?
We want to include high quality content from outside the ´óÏó´«Ã½ to enhance our pages. We'll be working on providing feeds of news and blogs from sources other than the ´óÏó´«Ã½.
Can I get the feeds and build them into my own website or personal feeds?
Yes, feeds will be available soon.
This is just the first stage of the project and new features are planned over the course of the next couple of months. We will keep you posted as the service evolves.
Finally for enduring the long days and short tempers that are an inevitable part of product development, I would like to thank all of the talented engineers, editors, designers and project staff who have worked so hard to get us to this stage.
Have a play around with /topics and leave me a comment.
Matthew McDonnell is Portfolio Executive, Search and Navigation, Internet Group, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Future Media and Technology.
Comment number 1.
At 4th Jun 2008, Keith wrote:The new pages look fairly nice in terms of layout and groupings. It's good to see the topics include a section of links to other sites.
I guess in some respects it expands on the existing 'in depth' type news sections where some pages where more information than news articles.
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Comment number 2.
At 5th Jun 2008, Briantist wrote:I think this looks excellent. I'm hoping that you will start using the links to these sections automatically from the ´óÏó´«Ã½ News pages.
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Comment number 3.
At 5th Jun 2008, Briantist wrote:Might be nice to open up the pages to Wikipedia-style editing, so that knowledgeable bbc.co.uk users can provide content and links off-site.
For example, you could require that each statement provided also has a ´óÏó´«Ã½ or non-´óÏó´«Ã½ link to support the statement. As long as this information was clearly marked with a "UGC" marking, it would allow bbc.co.uk users to directly contribute.
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Comment number 4.
At 5th Jun 2008, gottago wrote:It seems fun and useful but I can imagine it becoming redundant with people simply searching in Google. What sort of marketing would be given to this?
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