Archives for November 2007

One of my first memories of the BBC was as a child on my first trip to London. We stayed at a hotel in Piccadilly, a magical place for a young man from California, drank sugary watered-down tea and, due to jetlag, woke up and slept odd hours - which meant we were allowed to watch television whenever we awoke.

The BBC clock, the history of which you can learn more about at Andrew Wiseman's Television Room, is a memory which stuck with me from that first trip to the UK. I didn't yet know what the BBC was, but the clock signified to me the wonderful, eccentric strange place that England represented. It signified James Bond, Mary Poppins and all the best bits of CS Lewis.

This year is the tenth anniversary of the BBC's presence on the internet; it's a time of celebration of the past and of proud steps into the future. Watch for the return of the clock - a piece of the entire BBC audience's childhood - in a few weeks...

Update 2008-02-29: Alan Connor of this parish has written about the clock for the BBC News Magazine.

Richard Titus is Acting Head of User Experience & Design, BBC Future Media & Technology. Many thanks to Gary August of BBC Heritage for the photo.

I was at a meeting on Monday chaired by RT Hon Stephen Timms (minister for competitiveness), and attended by John Hutton, Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform.

All the players were there, including CEO of BT, Ben Verwaayen and his sidekick Ian Livingstone, CEO UK Cisco, board members from every ISP, the heads of the regional development agencies, etc.

The main thrust of the debate was:

Firstly: "Is the internet currently at creaking point?"

The view from most players: "no".

Secondly: "Will it get to creaking point in the short term?"

The consensus: probably not. There is still much that can be done to the main backbone infrastructure to improve performance before the massive step change of fibre to the home is needed, a conclusion similar to the US study I mentioned in my previous post.

Thirdly: "Does the business model exist to invest the billions to upgrade the 'access infrastructure' (the last bit to the home) to fibre?"

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There have been an increasing number of articles and reports about the internet reaching its capacity.

The Internet Innovation Alliance in the USA is trying to raise awareness about what they predict will be a crisis in available bandwidth, which could lead to slow-downs in about three years' time.

The focus is chiefly on North America, where the authors conclude that core fibre and switching/routing resources will scale well "to support virtually any conceivable user demand", but that making sure that Internet access infrastructure keeps up will require an investment by service providers of between US $42-55bn -- about 60-70% more than they currently plan to invest.

This is an issue that seems to raise its head from time to time in the UK too, the question being:

Should Internet Service Providers be allowed to start to "traffic shape", single out particular content that their subscribers want to access, and charge the content supplier - or even the subscriber - an additional fee?

Or should they remain effectively ignorant of the content that passes through their pipes: "net neutral"?

From the BBC's side, we have been in regular discussions with the ISPs for months about this. All those I've met personally, either individually (e.g. CarPhoneWarehouse's CEO Charles Dunstone) or in BroadBand Stakeholders Group meetings (e.g. BT's CEO Ben Verwaayen ) said that services like BBC iPlayer should help drive take-up of broadband, and drive demand for higher bandwidths, and were enthusiastic.

I’ll return to this subject in my next post, but do you think the Internet is about to reach its capacity?

Ashley Highfield is Director, BBC Future Media and Technology. Part 2 of this post is here.

Part 1 is here. This post is part of the tenth birthday celebrations of bbc.co.uk

When he was at Ask, Tuoc Luong once put the demands placed on search engines very succinctly:

"We need to read users' minds."

He was referring to the tricky job of interpreting the very small amount of information that the user gives when the type in a search query. Does someone looking for "jam" on the BBC website want some recipes, to listen to a documentary featuring Paul Weller, or to find out what the traffic will be like on their way home?

The "lilac" search results I described in the first part of this post only lasted for a few months, as in 2002 there was a major push to integrate web search within the BBC's search engine. Previously, as part of the BBC's remit to be a "trusted guide to the web for the UK", there was a directory of links called WebGuide - a small-scale Yahoo!-style directory which linked to sites of UK interest.

By now though, Google was indexing billions of web pages, and it was obvious that maintaining a small directory of sites wasn't going to scale up to the growing size of the internet. The BBC turned to search as a tool, trying to provide a web search that was safe for children, promoted UK content, and which, unlike all of the major commercial search engines, didn't take advertising in return for prominent placement.

In the summer of 2002 this launched as the main search box on a newly designed BBCi homepage. Getting involved in web search wasn't a popular move in some quarters. Commercial sites saw it as a threatening land-grab, and the BBC was accused of artificially inflating the ranking of BBC content within the results.

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Some of you may have noticed the announcement today that BBC Worldwide has joined forces with other UK broadcasters to offer a commercial portal to British television programmes.

I believe that it is much better for the BBC, ITV and C4 to have a say in a distribution service rather than leave it just to the likes of Joost or Babelgum to own the relationship with our audiences after the public service window. Better for our audiences too, as more money will return to the BBC from ad revenues to be invested into new programming.

I believe Kangaroo (only a working title), is complementary, and quite different, from BBC iPlayer.

BBC iPlayer offers a totally free seven-day catch up service (which very soon will offer streaming as well as downloading) to UK licence fee payers, with no advertising. It will soon also incorporate the highly successful BBC Radio Player (Kangaroo is video only).

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Part 2 is here. This post is part of the tenth birthday celebrations of bbc.co.uk

Until a couple of years ago, I was a Senior Development Producer at the BBC's New Media department. Whilst I was there I used to blog rather enthusiastically about my work, and the team at the BBC Internet blog has asked me to contribute some articles here about the history of the BBC's web site.

I first started to work at the BBC in 2000, as a junior member of a small team looking after the BBC's search engine. Back then, searching the BBC site was a bewildering and perplexing experience, as there was no global search across all of the content.

Instead, on the Today site, you could find a small box in the top right-hand corner that only searched the Today site. Or, if you were on the EastEnders site, there was a long search box at the bottom of the homepage, that only searched the EastEnders site, and so on.

As well as being somewhat randomly placed, the search boxes weren't even all using the same technology. BBC News used a product from Autonomy, whilst other bits of the BBC were indexed using software called Muscat. The results could be pretty appalling. One of my first jobs involved artificially putting the right URLs at the top of search engine results.

This wasn't a hi-tech solution. We had a spreadsheet that listed search terms, and the URL that should be displayed if a user employed them. We used to improve it based on the frustrated emails we got from the public. A mail would come in saying "I searched for 'Jeremy Paxman' and I never found the Newsnight site", and the team would dutifully add that 'jeremy paxman', 'paxman' and 'rottweiler' should produce bbc.co.uk/newsnight as the number one result.

The Muscat search engine was also unable to distinguish between different languages, so if you typed in 'Tony Blair' you were just as likely to get a news story mentioning his name from the BBC's Portuguese news site as from the English language site.

It was obvious it needed to be improved, and as part of the re-branding of BBC Online to BBCi in 2001, a new global search was introduced. The grey 'toolbar' was added to the top of (nearly) every BBC web page, placing a search box on every page of the site.

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Or, 10 Years Of Online Doctor Who

This post is part of the tenth birthday celebrations of bbc.co.uk

I don't think I've been to a meeting, presentation, or read a document from the BBC in the last couple of years that doesn't cite "Doctor Who" as a shining example of something-or-other.

Well, I'm about to indulge in the same vice myself, as I think you can get a pretty good snapshot of the development of the BBC's web activity over the last 10 years by looking at the programme.

Prior to the RTD-inspired revival, 1996 was the last time the BBC tried out Doctor Who on TV, with a one-off movie starring Paul McGann in the role. Promotion was strictly on air and in print - there was no such thing as a BBC Doctor Who web site.

During the gap between the TV movie and the arrival of Christopher Eccleston in the title role, there was plenty of off-air activity around the show. The BBC had a successful range of books based on the subsequent adventures of McGann's 8th Doctor, and Big Finish produced a monthly series of audio drama CDs featuring actors from the Doctor's past, some of which have now made their way onto BBC7.

And then there were the webcasts.

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I am very old. As you get older, time speeds up and your memory goes. In fact, I can't remember a time that bbc.co.uk didn't exist. But I'm reliably informed that December 15th will be the tenth birthday of bbc.co.uk (or "BBC Online", as it was then called).

So, to celebrate the BBC's achievements online over those ten years (and to jog my memory), the Internet Blog has commissioned Martin Belam (occasional BBC man and curator of the excellent currybetdotnet blog) to write a series of blog posts. Martin has done lots of web work for the BBC over the years. His posts will look at various aspects of the development of the BBC's web services. You can read them, and the other anniversary posts, here, and we'll also list them below as they go up.

I'm also hoping for contributions from key BBC executives giving their personal memories, and some juicy glimpses behind the scenes as the BBC's web offer evolved.

And memory can play tricks. So please do comment on anything you read on the posts, add your own perspectives and reminiscences, and suggest anything you'd like to see covered.

Posts so far:

• Ten Years Of Doctor Who Online
• Developing Search Part 1 and Part 2
• A Familiar Clock?
• The BBC's Homepage On July 7th 2005
• Revolution Not Evolution
• Gaps in the online archives
• Contact The Programme Part 1 and Part 2
• Tomorrow's World
• The Days Before Launch
• Razzmatazz, Fame And Fortune
• Remembering myBBC
• Goldrush
• Herding Digital Cats Part 1 and Part 2
• The World's Favourite Website At 10
• Brandon's History Of BBC On The Web
• "The WWW Info-Rainforest"

Nick Reynolds is the editor of the BBC Internet Blog.

So, my first blog post here. Hello there. Nice to see you. Pull up a chair, grab a cup of tea.

As it says on the bottom of this blog posting, I rejoice in the job title of "Head of Future Media & Technology, BBC Audio & Music Interactive" - a job title which results in a business card with some really quite tiny writing. If you're interested, I head up one of the "embedded" teams for Future Media & Technology - a set of people who work on our radio and music websites, mobile sites, DAB Digital Radio, our radio services on Freeview, Sky, Virgin Media, and, yes, the BBC Radio Player. We produce stuff like the recent BBC Electric Proms, as well as the award-winning BBC Radio 1 website, and the website behind the ever-more-popular BBC podcasts.

The BBC has a number of these embedded FM&T teams. Each of our teams act as knowledge-centres for particular types of BBC output. My team's work is around radio stations that have over 29 million listeners a week, so it's us that people turn to whenever they have questions about how audio and future media are mixing these days. I've worked in radio for over 18 years (as a presenter, a commercial copywriter, a webmaster and digital director), so I'd hope that I understand a thing or two about radio - even though I doubt that Chris Moyles would be entirely delighted if I did the show before him these days, instead of at the station we both worked at in the 1990s.

I got an email recently, asking something like: "Is Web 2.0 a threat or an aid to traditional media, like radio? How might we see traditional media adapt to stay competitive in this new world?"

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This is an extract from a post on the BBC Radio Labs blog. You can read more and leave a comment at the original post.

"We're now in our second week of rolling out our music based podcasts. This is big news for Audio & Music interactive and we're pretty excited about it.

Why? Well we've been offering radio programmes as podcasts since late 2004 now, but so far we have not included any commercial music for rights reasons. We have included unsigned music from various new/unsigned radio programmes such as Radio Northampton's Weekender and 1Xtra's Homegrown shows, but up to now we've had to offer speech-only podcasts from radio stations who mainly broadcast music..."

Continue reading here.

Chris Kimber is Managing Editor, BBC Audio&Music Interactive.

N.B. Photo of Chris taken from Ian Fenn's Flickr stream.

One of the comments on one of my previous posts on this blog suggested that I do an interview with Groklaw (this Wikipedia entry gives a good summary of what Groklaw is).

So I did an interview over the phone last week and it's now been published; I hope this helps to move the debate around a number of issues, especially DRM, onto where we go from here.

Ashley Highfield is Divisional Director, BBC Future Media and Technology Division.

I should be honest and tell you that until recently I worked in the BBC's Audio&Music Interactive department.

And I think they're great.

But it doesn't matter what I think. What matters is that their nifty ideas to make the BBC's podcast service easy to access on the new iPhone has gone down well with bloggers.

This post from the Radio Labs blog explains the detail. And the reaction? Well, Andrew Skinner says:

"The other handset manufacturers must be kicking themselves, asking why they can't create a product that to all intents and purposes is still niche but commands a place in the market that prompts the BBC to release to my knowledge the only device specific page on their site for their radio podcasts"

"This is very cool. Very cool indeed." adds Andrew Grant on Shiny Things. Digg's description is "pretty nifty". For Einar Vollset, it's simply "another reason to love my iPhone".

While Pocket Picks says:

"God bless the Beeb: they may come in for a critical shoeing from time to time, but if they're spending my licence fee on making shedloads of podcasts available for my iPhone, I'm happy."

Nick Reynolds is editor, BBC Internet Blog.

I recently attended two Media/Convergence Conferences talking about the changes coming down the line. They could not have been more different.

The Monaco media conference wheeled out the traditional media's heavy hitters: James Murdoch, Barry Diller, Maurice Levy (the CEO of Publicis), and some really interesting new media rising stars. (Amongst many, my favourites included KickApps, and Hillcrestlabs who demonstrated a highly impressive TV UI capable of intuitively navigating through vast amounts of video in a way that makes the old Sky-like EPG grid look like it's from another century - which, of course, it is).

Talking of Sky, I apparently had an angry exchange with James Murdoch at the Forum.

The FT's Andrew Edgecliff-Johnson told me it was worth the price of the flight. All that actually happened was that, from the floor, I corrected James' assertion that the BBC was a "State Broadcaster" and pointed out that our editorial independence was perhaps one of the reasons why our audience valued us. This drove him to exclaim that the BBC is a "state agency with police powers to collect a tax." At least you know where you are with the Murdochs!

The agenda at Monaco dealt with the well-worn issues of convergence, and whether the new players complemented or competed with established media.

Much more thought-provoking was last month's Google Zeitgeist. This US conference, by comparison, dealt with what the conference organisers believed was the biggest issue our industry faces: climate change and corporate social responsibility more generally. It wheeled out even bigger guns, Bill Clinton, Al Gore (literally minutes before jetting off to pick up his Nobel prize), and Britain's very own David Cameron. There are some YouTube videos from the conference here.

Putting to one side the arguments about the BBC's impartiality in the climate change debate, what is the BBC and the technology/media/telecommunication industries' role to reduce both our and our audiences' consumption of energy?

I have no policy to propose on this subject, just a strong feeling that there is more of a debate to be had. Here are some thoughts:

• What is the most energy efficient way of distributing our content?
• Does digital satellite produce a lower energy footprint than DAB for getting Radio 1 into the home?
• Is peer-to-peer a good use of energy if it requires your home computer to be left on?
• Rather like grams of C0₂ per km travelled, is there an equivalent measurement of distribution efficiency? The amount of content distributed divided by energy taken to do so? (Mb/s ÷ Kj). Does this include the power consumption of the receiving devices (I heard that DAB radios consume seven times as much power as FM radios. I also heard from a reliable source that apparently the Sky+ set top box in 'power save mode' actually consumes almost the same amount of energy as when it's fully on whenever its receiving push-VOD content overnight).

This issue can only become more important. Our responsibility to save energy inside the BBC is obvious: but what is our role with respect to our audiences? How far does "Inform & Educate" take us with energy issues?

PS: Finally, a nice counter to James Murdoch's views about the BBC came from Five's CEO Jane Lighting, who, interviewed at the Plymouth Media Partnership event - which was jointly organised by the Royal Television Society - highlighted the BBC's iPlayer as one area where the corporation was a pathfinder for the commercial TV sector.

"Thank God they [the BBC] have made that investment in what is a risky area", she added.

Ashley Highfield is Divisional Director, BBC Future Media and Technology Division.

Part Two: Editorial Dilemmas and the Future

Earlier this week, I posted a brief history of the BBC Blogs Network and provided some insight into the technical dilemmas we've faced since launch 18 months ago. Today's post looks at the editorial challenges.

I don't believe that every BBC television or radio programme or personality should have a blog, nor do I know of anyone within the BBC who would want this, yet hardly a week goes by without at least one request for a new blog.

There's a process for the proposal of new blogs which, currently, doesn't capture whether or not our would be bloggers have what the Guardian's Emily Bell calls one's "inner blogger". Without an author who has a "drive to blog", a blog that looks great on paper ends up lacking in substance and appears soulless.

Many people don't have an inner blogger and not every BBC presenter, reporter, producer or editor wants to blog. Indeed, there are some who think the BBC shouldn't be blogging at all. For example, earlier this year, the BBC's Senior News Correspondent Kate Adie said to a blogger:

"... journalists shouldn't have any time to blog - there are too many stories waiting to be told!"

Adie has a point - blogging does take time - but I disagree that it necessarily takes time away from more fruitful journalistic and production activities. In fact, I'd argue that, where blogging is an integral part of the process of journalism or production, it's quite beneficial to both the final product and audience's understanding of it.

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I am a newcomer to the BBC's Future Media Division, and consider myself to be well "behind the curve" on all things webby and technological compared to the clever people who work here.

So I was flattered to be invited to the meeting last week between the BBC's Tony Ageh (Controller, Internet) and Mark Taylor of the Open Source Consortium [pictured, right]. The meeting's aim was to have a discussion about the BBC's iPlayer.

Mark's already been interviewed about the meeting elsewhere and there's been a statement from the Open Source Consortium and some comment on blogs.

Last Friday the estimable Backstage team recorded a discussion with Mark Taylor, Becky Hogge from the Open Rights Group and Robin Doran, Matthew Browning, Jonathan Tweed and Ben Smith (all BBC Staff connected to the development of the iPlayer).

This is now available to listen to as a podcast here.

If you have any thoughts on the podcast, please do comment.

For me, what was good about the original meeting was its grown-up tone. Some of the more extreme views expressed about the iPlayer seem to be based for example on the belief that rights don't exist or are irrelevant and that rights holders aren't important. So it was good to hear Mark saying that the OSC accepts that rights holders do have legitmate interests that need to be considered.

Tony outlined the iPlayer story to date. I don't want to give away any secrets from a private meeting. But Tony acknowledged that we haven't done ourselves any favours in the way we've explained our decisions about the iPlayer.

The outcome of the meeting was that George Wright, who leads a new development team within FM&T, is going to have more discussions with free and open source software people (some suggested by Mark and the OSC) to see if there are ways we can work together.

I'm hoping to get George to talk about these on the BBC Internet Blog.

Nick Reynolds is editor, BBC Internet Blog.

Back in July, Bobbie Johnson wrote an article for The Guardian listing what he thought of as the top ten UK recent web start-ups. His list, based on his inside knowledge, was:

• Dopplr Social networking for frequent travellers
• Extate Intelligent search of property websites
• Garlik Online identity management
• MindCandy Alternate reality gaming
• Moo Print on demand: cards, notes and stickers
• OnOneMap Map-based property search
• Touch Local Local directory services
• Trusted Places User-created local information
• Zopa Peer to peer lending
• Zubka Recruitment 2.0

The article got me thinking about other criteria that could be used to identify the next big thing(s) on the web coming out of the UK.

One comment suggested looking at UK start-ups that have caught the eyes of VCs: "Of course, one way to pick likely winners could be to look at those that have managed to raise high six-figure to seven-figure funding. From memory, that list is likely to include: garlik, Horsesmouth, MindCandy, Reevoo, VideoJug, Zopa."

To take another approach, our internal research department works with the Nielsen NetRating statistics, and has pulled out a list of the fastest growing sites with reach still below most peoples' radar:

Source: Neilsen Online, UK NetView, home&work data, including applications, July-August 2007
Text version of the table to follow

What other ways can we track emerging web phenomena? How would you aggregate all this information, including what people are talking about on social networks and blogs, into a "best of the best" to help spot the next big British dot com?

Any ideas?

(IBM has a technology that can scan vast swathes of the net monitoring the "buzz", looking for things that people are talking about: we're working with them on it. Its called the 'semantic super computing environment' at their research labs.)

Ashley Highfield is Divisional Director, BBC Future Media and Technology Division. This is taken from a post on his internal blog.

Part One: History & Technical Challenges

The BBC Blogs Network has been up and running for 18 months. This milestone provides a good opportunity to give you some insight into what we've been doing, how we think our efforts measure up, and where we might be headed in the future, editorially and technically.

That's a lot to cover, so we're splitting the discussion in two. Today's post deals with the technical aspects of our Blogs Network and later this week, I'll return with a second post looking at editorial challenges.
So, first: some history. In early 2006, following several forays into blogging by the BBC, most notably BBC Scotland's Island Blogging, Ouch! and Nick Robinson's Newslog, the decision was made to customise and install an off-the-shelf blogging solution and create the BBC Blogs Network, which launched in April.

The graph below provides four snapshots, taken at six month intervals, of the unique visitors and visitor sessions for the BBC Blogs Network, starting with that first month and ending with October 2007.

The graph illustrates that the BBC blogs have, in aggregate, found a large and steadily growing audience. Additionally, it's worth noting that the average time of each visit has remained fairly static at just under four minutes.

The downside of this success has been our technical infrastructure becoming increasingly unstable. It was built quickly and involved a number of customisations to the software which effectively ended our ability to easily install software patches and bug fixes provided by the vendor in order to deal with some of the technical issues we've faced.

Our technical woes will have been invisible to most people visiting a BBC blog, but this will be of little comfort to those who have encountered them first-hand, including Newsnight editor Peter Barron who recently posted on The Editors: "Often I try to respond to a comment or complaint about the programme and end up gnawing my knuckles in frustration as the response either doesn't appear for many hours or fails to materialise at all. Hardly the best way to have a free flowing dialogue with our viewers."

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This is an extract from a post on our sister blog The Editors by the editor of the BBC News website. You can read more and leave a comment at the original post.

This week we launched the tenth in our set of correspondents' blogs, with Justin Webb's America. It seems a good time to take stock.

Over the past couple of years they have quietly changed the way in which the best of the BBC's journalism gets out to our audiences.

When Nick Robinson started his blog - which was the first of these - someone in the newsroom likened it to a kind of hotline straight to Nick's brain - because by reading it you got to find out - often way ahead of his appearance on any broadcast outlet - what angles of a story he was contemplating, and what his take on events was going to be. You still can.

Read on and join in at The Editors.

Steve Herrmann is the editor of the BBC News website.

I have read all the posts here, and followed links to further discussion on various blogs, with great interest. The first thing I want to say is that I am genuinely sorry if I've caused any offence to Linux users, and certainly did not mean to imply that you are not important to us. The BBC is committed to open standards, across television, radio and the internet wherever possible.

We do maximise the reach of our services by distributing our content via closed or prioprietary networks (Virgin Media, Sky, Tiscali TV/HomeChoice, mobile platforms, etc.) where appropriate, but also try and ensure that our content can be consumed through open solutions (whether over IP, DAB, or DTT). Sometimes, due to issues somewhat beyond our control (e.g. rightsholders conditions), we need to use proprietary solutions. We are exploring open source solutions to these. We can, and should, always do more, but if I may, a few points you might not be aware of:

The vast, vast majority of bbc.co.uk is powered by open source components (Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl being the chief components [the LAMP stack] - our Real Media content has always been available on a number of OSes - from Windows and Mac through to Linux, BSD, Solaris and HP-UX.)

We have released to the developer community a number of the building blocks used as part of the bbc.co.uk application development process. The complete list is on bbc.co.uk/opensource.

We intend to open up our Rapid Application Development office (part of the Research & Innovation department, in which we are increasing investment) to various software community groups and we are in conversation with some of the major distributors about options for GNU/Linux. The result should be that future applications get designed with "open-ness" built in from the get-go.

Of course, we should release more applications on backstage.bbc.co.uk, and we intend to increase the number of projects within the BBC's open source programme (foremost amongst these is Dirac, which far from being dead - as one comment suggested - was looking extremely healthy [and award winning] when I saw it last at IBC in September).

We're looking to do more to promote open standards within the BBC, and to invest in the talent that has developed within these communities.

I will also kick off a piece of research to look into the size and more importantly the growth of the open source community within the UK, and what role the BBC could and should have in promoting it.

It's also worth mentioning that our service of podcasts and downloads of radio programmes is DRM-free.

I didn't anticipate this blog would get off to quite the start it did(!), but that's what it's here for, and I hope you will, over time, recognise that this is a genuine attempt to listen and engage and that, being human, I won't get everything right (especially in wide-ranging lengthy interviews), but I'm certain you'll put me right!

Ashley Highfield is Divisional Director, BBC Future Media and Technology Division

On Ashley's recent post about Linux figures, some people have asked for more detail on the information that the BBC gathers about the operating systems which are used by visitors to its websites. There was particular interest in whether the statistics for the web servers which host the BBC's News and Sport content were any different to the statistics for the whole of the BBC.

I posted the output from our reporting system to the BBC Backstage mailing list which Martin Belam has conveniently summarised on his blog.

There is some difference between Journalism and the rest of the BBC which may be explained, as Martin suggests, by the different usage patterns for the News site, although I don't know whether all the differences are statistically significant or could be explained by sampling error. (Compared to the rest of the BBC, more people visit the News site from an office computer, during the day. We have data from independent sources which confirms this).

All of the BBC's regular reporting mechanisms use the User Agent string to make inferences about the client operating system. In a follow-up post I should be able to give you information about how many User Agent strings are classified as "operating system unknown", and about the split between visitors from the UK and from outside the UK.

We will publish this data regularly on both the Backstage archive and this blog.

Kevin Hinde is Head of Software Development, Journalism, BBC Future Media & Technology.

Programme support. It used to be so easy. If you wanted to know when a show was on, you reached for the Radio Times. If you wanted to follow it up afterwards, you sent in a stamped, self-addressed envelope. If you missed it... well... you missed it. Since the earliest days of bbc.co.uk, the BBC has responded to the new worlds of on-demand and interactivity by producing thousands of lovingly crafted programme-related sites offering anything from listings, games, clips and educational information to Listen Again, the iPlayer and full live Test The Nation-style interactivity.

These sites serve all sorts of different needs, but are not always serving the best interests of the user - a point eloquently made on Dadblog a while back. And while our programme offering was vast, it was neither comprehensive nor was it permanent. Try searching the web for information about BBC Two's The Verdict (which had a substantial web presence when broadcast) and all you will find is this press release.

A key plank of Tom Loosemore's bbc.co.uk 2.0 strategy was to ensure a base level of consistency, quality and permanence for all BBC programmes online. A single URL for every episode of every programme made for the BBC... forever. At the same time, we wanted to explore how to automate some of the process, capturing the metadata naturally produced in the production process and publish it dynamically so that users could find out the status of the programme at any point in its lifecycle. So /programmes was born.

As Tom Scott revealed, it launched last month in beta and you can expect significant changes in the coming months as we roll out new features and functionality. And as Martin Belam points out, it may be long overdue - but thanks to the talented technology team in Audio&Music Interactive, we have now made that crucial first step in a new direction...

Sophie Walpole is workstream leader for Automated Programme Support.

I have received and seen on the net a lot of comment on this point of the number of Linux users using bbc.co.uk, so I have had a good look into the validity of the figures I'd been given.

The BBC uses a range of systems to calculate user levels and the reporting system used to provide the numbers I quoted gave the lowest number (this is the system we use the most widely, and I've asked for a thorough check to see whether it is correctly picking up all Linux users).

Alternative analysis that we have run off which performs the measurement in different ways suggests that the potential number of Linux users could range from 0.3% to 0.8% (which, from a total UK bbc.co.uk userbase of 12.2m weekly users [source: TNS] could imply a userbase between 36,600 and 97,600. We'll try and get a more accurate picture: over 30,000 Linux users is a not insubstantial number, but we do have to keep this in context with the vast majority of users who use either Windows or Macs to access bbc.co.uk.

Ashley Highfield is Director, BBC Future Media and Technology.