Self Service Shopping

I know I'm not posting much. I'm tired and uninspired. Such is life.

At least I actually managed to have sex this weekend. Woo.

One thing I'm a bit pissed off about - the darling beeb have just launched their new 'Media Selector' - aimed to feed broadband video only to UK LFP's. That's licence fee payers to those of you who were confused by that TLA.

This is a great thing - becasue we can't indefinately keep up the cost of streaming video to everyone everywhere, and it seems a bit unfair that the LFP pays for a bunch of freeloading yanks to watch clips. However, it's knackered the blogging community: It's almost impossible to provide a specific link to a piece of video on the BBC site, and if you manage it, it launches in a pop up, meaning no contextual navigation. Which means you can get the best bit of video in the world that everyone wants to send to their mates, but noone does. And if they do, their mates are stuck in limbo and won't scamper off and see other great BBC content.

Sigh.

This happens a lot - much BBC development is done by very cloistered coders in a central department, who forget about things like business need, or making CPS's quicker and easier to use than handcoding. Usability and elegance of code are stressed so much (not a bad thing in and of itself, you understand) that you end up with systems that provide a great (if boring to look at) service to the audience, but punish the poor people who have to type in the raw XML.

End to end joined up thinking is in short supply.