Creative Future Day at the BBC

The following are my own views, and not necessarily those of my employer, the BBC.

(Although I am about to go and help with research on the BBC web 2.0 strategy, so hopefully the two views will coincide a bit more over the next few months...)

I thought, seeing as there's a bit of a kerfuffle around this idea that 'The BBC is building it's own version of MySpace' going around the internets, that, as a public service, I'd use a couple of quid of licensefee to transcribe the actual words uttered by Ashley Highfield in the internal BBC video.

This comes in the 'Share' section of a presentation under the headings of 'Find, Play, Share, Transform, Enable'. It was part of today's Creative Futures sessions. I've tacked on a bit about the Creative Archive too, just so you get the *whole* of the share section.

SHARE

Ashley Highfield: He's the 'big picture guy'
The ability of sharing programmes, your own thoughts, your own blogs, your own home videos along with our content - creating YOUR space.
Working out what your friends are watching, exchanging views and comments, and actually sort of building bbc.co.uk around you.

Grant Bremner
The creative archive is basically a license - its a framework the BBC has created along with other partners - including the British Film Institute, Channel Four, the Open University - that allows the public to effectively download the content from the BBC that we make available for non commercial purposes, that they can use for their creative endeavors. So basically we're allowing the public to actually download our content and use it.

And from this, you get a report in the Guardian that states (at the time of writing):

The BBC today unveiled radical plans to rebuild its website around user-generated content, including blogs and home videos, with the aim of creating a public service version of MySpace.com.

And:

Mr Highfield said the share concept would allow users to "create your own space and to build bbc.co.uk around you", encouraging them to launch ther own blogs and post home videos on the site.

I'd encourage you to make up your own mind on whether or not the BBC is actually doing its own version of MySpace. The Guardian certainly did.

What I'd like to point to instead is the Programme Archive. A couple of folk here, just for a giggle, took an enormous database of eighty odd years worth of BBC output, and plopped it out on to the web. It's amazing.

The lovely thing is the way it all links together - by people, time, concepts. You have to admire the detail the hidden unsung heroes of the BBC archives have been adding to their database over time.

Imagine that, but with clips. And possibly a wikipedia entry for each show...

Anyway. If any of you have any interesting thoughts about what the BBC should be doing in this grim meathook brave web2.0 future, do let me know.