大象传媒

We made a mistake yesterday, as the . As is our regular practice, we added an e-mail on the bottom of a story about a military offensive north of Baghdad, asking for people in the area to get in touch with us.This is the sort of thing we do every day, on scores of news stories, and through this device we get many authentic first-hand accounts from all over the world. In Iraq it has been invaluable in finding out from people living there what has happened.

However, yesterday we used the phrase "have you seen any troop movements" in this request for information. The Telegraph and some others wrongly interpreted this as an attempt on our part to seek out military detail. We phrased it badly, and as soon as we realised what we had done - a couple of hours - we removed the form.

I want to emphasise, though, that we published no e-mails on this subject. We certainly did not intend to seek out any military detail and wouldn't have published it if we had received it. It was our mistake to use that phrase, when we were simply asking for eye witness reports. I apologise for confusion or upset caused, and thank those of you who wrote in so swiftly to point out our mistake. The 大象传媒 takes its responsibilities regarding the security and safety of the armed forces extremely seriously. We would never publish information which would endanger their safety.

If you visit the message boards this week you may notice a few changes. They are all there as a result of feedback from our users who, back in November, took part in a website questionnaire and a number of focus groups to tell us how they wanted the site to develop.

Their message was we want more clarity about just how many comments each debate receives, what is done with them, and the status of their own individual comment or complaint. They also want to see their messages published, but not necessarily ones from other people which they don鈥檛 think are as good or pertinent! They also want the pages to be a good read.

So, from this week on the right hand side of any debate, we now have a box with the total number of comments received, those published, those rejected and those in the moderation queue. At times this moderation queue will seem excessively large 鈥� today the Virginia shooting debate had over 6,000 in the queue, built up since last night when the moderator left at 11pm. When the debate is closed, the queue of messages is incorporated into the total as no further comments can be added by the team.

Members can see at a glance the number of comments they have had published, and how many complaints they have made in the last week. They will also see the status of all of the comments they have sent in. The four options are; a comment was published, it was unpublished (as the debate is closed and it didn鈥檛 get on), it is waiting to be moderated, or rejected, where a moderator decided it broke the House Rules.

All of these terms plus the House Rules are explained on the right hand side. There is also a page for complaints made in the last seven days 鈥� and the status of those; upheld, or not, or awaiting a decision.

We have also decided to highlight the messages made by the 大象传媒 moderators in a different colour so they stand out and are noticed. Usually these are requests from us to keep debates on topic and avoid having a dialogue between two users to the detriment of anyone else reading or contributing!

The statistics from our Have Your Say debates continues to rise - and we hope these changes will encourage more people to take part.

In January the number of page views to the Have Your Say part of the site peaked at over 12 million and we now have just under 200,000 registered users.

We now publish 49% of messages received 鈥� up from around 25% from a couple of years ago. Of course as soon as something momentous happens that people want to tell us about, that can rise to over 30,000 e-mails for any one topic and the percentage published will not be as high.

Please let us know what you think of the changes, and if you have any more suggestions to make. We really do want you to have your say!

It all started with an email to yourpics@bbc.co.uk at 15:19 on Tuesday.

鈥淒ear Sirs,
As a British Airways passenger, I arrived in Terminal One at Heathrow Airport yesterday afternoon, and was appalled by the sight which met me in the baggage reclaim area. There were literally hundreds of items of 鈥榣ost鈥� luggage piled up all around the reclaim area. I have attached some photos, but also have some comments.鈥�

Colin Barber then went on to list his concerns and ended saying: 鈥淓very item of luggage represents a spoilt Christmas/New Year for someone.鈥�

Clearly, there was a story here, and like many other tip-offs from our audience, we wrote it up as .

It certainly did strike a chord. Within minutes, we had tens of emails of lost luggage woes. Declan Curry, the business presenter on Breakfast mentioned the story and showed some of Mr Barber鈥檚 pictures.

More pictures began arriving of luggage piled up. People began emailing us to say they recognised their bags!

As has become common practice now with our UGC (user generated content) area, all this information was passed around news programmes. Each one of the emails could have made a story in their own right.

British Airways then came out with a statement and apologised to customers for the problems, but it became clear this wasn鈥檛 something that was going to go away quickly.

News 24 and the One O鈥機lock News got on the case, and Mr Barber appeared on television and on Five Live. Correspondents were dispatched to Heathrow.

The way this story has snowballed is a lesson to us all; from a single email a general widespread problem was revealed and those who were ultimately responsible had to explain to the public what they were going to do about it.

If you鈥檝e lost luggage, you can send us your stories via .

Just to set the record right, there has been no change in 大象传媒 policy with regard to paying for user generated content.

The "shock" headline on yesterday suggesting the 大象传媒 had done a U-turn on its policy and was now set to pay for all this content coming in from members of the public to our TV, radio and online services is just not right. But I suppose a story saying the 大象传媒 had published guidelines for its journalists repeating existing policy in one area is not quite as attractive.

We do not in normal circumstances pay for user generated content. Nearly all the content we receive comes without a request for payment and is sent for entirely different reasons than making a profit. This includes the hundreds of pictures and videos we are sent each week - from pictures of people's travels all over the world to local news events like fires, crashes and demonstrations.

Of course it includes dramatic pictures of events like Buncefield and 7 July too. If we did get a unique piece of news content, as an example, , we would under our normal newsgathering criteria pay for that. We've always done that and continue to do so.

As a publicly funded organisation we are in a different position from the other media organisations asking for this content - would those who pay for our services be happy for us to give 拢100 each to each person who takes a picture for , when people are happy to send them for free? We showcase hundreds of pictures from the public a week (mainly online but also on News 24 on occasion) and hundreds of thousands of people see them. For those who send and those who view, it's a process which doesn't have to involve money.

Of the 16,000 emails we have received since last week鈥檚 crisis at Britain鈥檚 airports over the terror plot, the majority now are full of tales of lost or stolen luggage and miserable accounts of how people have coped without their valuables and precious possessions after a flight.

The two people featured on last night鈥檚 Six O鈥機lock News and various radio programmes - - both came from stories sent into the website.

There is a great deal of confusion out there and again the Have Your Say message boards are a form of therapy for thousands of people who cannot get through to the airlines directly to let off some steam. 鈥淎ll my 'we're all in this together' sympathy for the airlines and BAA in dealing with this emergency is quickly disintegrating,鈥� wrote Laura from the Isle of Islay.

Anyone who has ever travelled on a long flight with young children will sympathise with this one from John in Newcastle: 鈥淲e have probably 'lost' one of our most treasured possessions - my daughter鈥檚 teddy bear 'Gary' on a connecting flight from Heathrow to Newcastle after flying in from San Francisco on Friday the 14th. Put him in my wife's vanity case. Of course out of our six pieces of luggage the vanity case is the one missing.鈥�

Dan, from Shrewsbury has managed to see a funny side: 鈥淚 took a short flight to Europe over the weekend and of course had to check everything into the hold. I have no problem with that except that the one bag on the flight that went missing was mine with my laptop, car keys, iPod, camera etc in it. I hope someone is putting them to good use somewhere.鈥�

Interesting thought - and maybe another facet of our public service remit - the message board has become the electronic version of a good listener! Feel free to to have a good moan.

A correspondent to the debate on the doctored photographs asks an interesting question about how the 大象传媒 is countering images from the public showing 'posed or inaccurate images'.

We now receive around 300 images a week to our . Most of these are interesting snaps taken of people鈥檚 families, holidays or lives in general. A fair proportion on a busy week are from news events, ie from Lebanon, or Britain during the heatwave.

Of course, we are aware that some people will use this system to try and hoax us, to send something which is not quite as it seems. It鈥檚 something we are on the look out for as we go through the images, and to date we鈥檝e not published anything which has been problematic. But that doesn鈥檛 make us complacent. You do get a second sense with these images, and the team which are looking at them are doing so day in day out.

You can obviously follow all the usual journalistic paths; you can email or ring the photographer back and check are they were they say they are, does their number appear to be the code of the area they say, it is their photograph. If you get multiple photographs of the same image you would think that maybe they have been picked up from an agency or sharing site and don鈥檛 belong to the person sending them.

If they appear 'photoshopped', or almost too good, you would double check.

Some people take grabs off a television - these you can spot. You can do a quick technical check to see when the image was taken and with what device. You can compare with other photos from the same area, from TV images you may have of the place, you can check other photo agency wires to see if the image crops up elsewhere.

Most genuine emailers will add text, a plausible story, which can be checked out. You take care, and always use your professional judgement. No matter how pressing the need is to get that image up on the web or on the tv screen, the verification process must be gone through.

However I would say that the vast majority of people don鈥檛 want to hoax you, they want to get their image published and so share their story with the world, and that for our journalism and reflecting what is really going on in the world, can only be a good thing.

While I鈥檓 here... I wanted to add a note about the sheer volume of comments we鈥檝e received on the crisis in Lebanon.

Since it began the Have Your Say debates have received well over 100,000 comments - and had 3.5 million page impressions. It has been consistently the only story people want to talk about or read people鈥檚 views on. On one day - 26 July - we received over 6,000 emails.

But that of course means that many people who do send their views may not get them published. There is no agenda here. On massive stories like this we do try to pick a range of views expressed differently - it would be no good if every one said more or less the same thing in the same way. We do try and pick comments from people actually living through or with direct experience of the event - on either side.

We know how frustrating it can be not to get a view which is held very deeply on the pages, but I can assure all those in this position, we are working flat out to get through as many as we can. Thank you all for your contributions.

Words, as any journalist knows, can be loaded. One which has cropped up and led to lots of conversations in some blogs is "dhimmi". It's not a very well-known word (it's not in the Oxford English Dictionary, for instance), but it is one which raises passions.

"Dhimmi" refers historically to non-Muslims living in Islamic states whose religion was tolerated as long as they accepted the supremacy of the Islamic state. It is now used, sometimes in the word "dhimmitude", to mean "situations where non-Muslims in the West are allegedly championing Islamic causes above others" ().

Recently in our Have Your Say discussions, "dhimmi" has been used in a context which breaches our , specifically that posts should not be abusive, offensive or provocative. Some users have tried to register with names using variations of "dhimmi", again sometimes in an offensive way. When we spotted this trend, we put the word "dhimmi" on our automated list of blocked words, mostly swearing and racially offensive terms. That meant that any reference to "dhimmi" would mean the posting was automatically deleted. (Having a blocked list means it's possible to filter out abuse and ensure comments do not break any laws - especially useful since our debates get several thousand messages each day.)

On reflection, though, it's clear that the word "dhimmi" can be used in the modern sense in a non-abusive way, so we've decided that it should not now be blocked. The list of blocked words is a moving object - words and meanings do change from time to time - so we'll monitor how the debate goes.

Getting the balance right between freedom of speech and removing offensive content can be difficult at times. We do have our rules, which we enforce, because we want the debates on our site to reflect intelligent, informed and legally expressed opinions. But we're not interested in stopping discussion - that, after all, is the point.

Vicky Taylor is editor of Interactivity.

It has been quite an experience.

At the rehearsal the day before the interactive webcast with President Putin there were about 50 Russian officials in the hastily-made (but state of the art) studio, all giving their view on who should sit where. That was probably what you would expect inside the Kremlin.

What has been different is the apparent keenness to take on . There have been no no-go areas. No asking to see any script or enquiries (gently or not so gently) asking what we were going to pick as our main questions. The main issues of contention was should Bridget Kendall (our presenter) sit next to the President. In the end she did.

Arriving at the Kremlin today though, our initial entry was delayed as we weren鈥檛 all in one group as the form suggested we would be, and any bags we were carrying had to be decanted and anything you needed taken in by hand. A bit tricky when you are carrying technical equipment. Still it gave the whole proceeding an edge.

The President arrived exactly one minute late and didn鈥檛 stop for the next two hours and fifteen minutes (watch it here) - an extra half hour suddenly found in his diary. It was a marathon performance by any standards - every one of our 12 questions on a vast range of topics from North Korea, relations with George Bush to the problems with getting visas to travel to Russia, was asked.

The one topic which has been preoccupying the Russian press - about why he kissed a young boy on the tummy during a visit to Red Square - also got put. He picked a couple of questions himself; poverty, pension and the military were his choices. We even got the impression the President enjoyed answering them all.

About a week ago, when we first asked people if they had family relatives who had fought in the Somme, we were surprised to get over 50 e-mails back within an hour. Now has just under 500 contributions, many of course with moving, heroic tales of how young lives were lost. Photographs too - obviously carefully kept in a cupboard over the years, now in the computer age, scanned and shared with thousands.

News 24 and the Six O'Clock News have been reporting from France and asking for people's memories. This is one of the responses, which came from a 16-year-old boy:

"I've been watching your series on The Somme with fascination, as I have just been on a school trip with other Year 11s to visit the whole Western Front. It was an amazing experience, once in a lifetime, and totally unexpectedly I found I had an ancestor who had died on the Somme, and who is commemorated on the Thiepval memorial. The experience was totally awe-inspiring, and moved me to researching my great-great-great-great- uncle's history."

I read this after spending an hour at a rather down-beat presentation about public participation in civic life and why Britain fares so badly compared to other European countries and the United States.

To find that so many people want to share something of an event which happened 90 years ago certainly helped me put some of those findings in perspective.

Users sent in their pictures of the Airbus A380 when it made its first flight to the UK, and many of those pictures were featured on the 大象传媒 News website and on 大象传媒 News 24. One of them recorded the appearance of the photo on the TV, and has now posted that recording to YouTube. So to complete the circle, it's only proper that we should in turn link to that posting.

When the Six O'Clock News commissioned a survey into the UK's attitude to the problem of drugs, the results were perhaps surprising.

Three-quarters of respondents said they believed drugs were a problem in their area and of the 1,900 people surveyed more than half said the police weren't doing enough. As often with these statistical insights into life, we ran pages of the news website to capture more of these experiences.

The responses were extraordinary. Literally, hundreds of e-mails telling of direct experience of the problem of drugs; users of all ages and backgrounds, anguished parents and friends of users, shopkeepers and householders affected by dealing outside their front doors and the GPs and teachers coping with it all.

One wrote to us: "Well done, 大象传媒! It was brave decision to take this investigation as main extended item. It is the only way that the public will have a full picture of the enormity of the problem and the lack of action to deal with it."

Many painted a hopeless picture: "Drugs are the scourge of this country and have been for decades. Drug dealers just laugh at the police because they have been operating for so long now they fear no one. The drug business is so powerful and effective that it is hard to break down their operation."

There were also a huge number of people who felt drugs weren't in themselves the real culprit. "The biggest drug problem in my area is alcohol," wrote Simon from Fife, who was the top recommended comment on the debate.

It's by getting this direct route to our audiences that we can explore issues that are at the heart of our communities. We're not policy makers and may have not come up with any answers, but this week we really did feel we had touched the nerve of a nationwide problem.