beatnic - just wondering

Generally I like the new look BBC homepage which officially went live last week after a couple of months in “beta”.

It’s got most of what I want: news, weather, listings - the iplayer link could be more visible.

Redesigns are rarely straightforward to get right. I’ve overseen a few in my time. You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t - as they say.

It looks like the feedback from people who’ve commented on the BBC’s internet blog has been mainly positive.

One recurring theme in the feedback, however, and the one thing I would like to see changed, is the use of colour change when different “tabs” are selected.

It goes against human nature and breaks the Gestalt principle of grouping objects by similarity.

Below are four thumbnail images from today’s BBC homepage to illustrate. Click on the thumbnail to see the full size image.

When I click on a coloured tab, key elements around the page change colour, using the tab colour as their base.

Sub-consciously I infer a relationship between everything which switches to the new colour-scheme, when in fact there is no relationship.

I’ve just been having a bit of fun with this… The Blog Readability Test. What level of education is required to understand your blog? - as seen on David Cushman’s site.

Apparently you require a “high school” education to read this blog.

I haven’t dug around to see what, if any, algorithm is being used to calculate readability.

Rather worryingly when I put http://news.bbc.co.uk in it came back saying you needed to have a college postgrad education to read it, and to be able to read www.google.com you need to be a Genius. Something fishy going on there methinks.

[...] I think we have been slow to embrace blogs as a way of discussing our strategy and direction. This often leads to the debate happening elsewhere, based often on only half the information, and without our being able fully to join in the debate. We’ve not done ourselves any favours, and we want to use this blog to re-engage with our friends and critics.

Ashley Highfield

Ergo… the BBC Internet Blog

Welcome to the BBC Internet blog, a sister blog to the existing Editors’ blogs for News and Sport. A place where we, senior staff from BBC Future Media teams will talk about issues raised by you about the technology behind bbc.co.uk, our mobile services and the BBC’s presence on the internet.

The links on this blog and its del.icio.us stream are chosen by Alan Connor and Nick Reynolds.

Good luck to Nick et al.

Blogging is changing and challenging journalism. It changed and challenged mine even though I was doing the blogging. It is a way to focus the collective intelligence of the audience onto the facts and arguments. Moblogging from a single device that can do words, pictures, audio and video gives us a taste of the future: when the device can produce broadcast quality video the only limitation will be bandwidth. Everybody will have their own TV station. I can hear that line from The Incredibles - “when everyone is special nobody will be”. But it does not necessarily follow, since blogging, like Google, is a way of voting for excellence and even, frighteningly, voting for truth.

Paul Mason rounds off his Newsnig8t blog with some fascinating thoughts on blogging, journalism and what’s happening to broadcasting.