What the BBC found mind blowing…

by on July 24, 2006

We’re almost out of the house (had to come home and do some last minute cleanup) but what stuck with me about the BBC was that they came over and watched me blog. They thought it was mind blowing that I could send my words out to the world (they checked out my stats and said that theirs weren’t much better on most of their Web pages) and they thought it was cool when I got three comments almost immediately after the show.

  • Robert, you could throw at BBC a question back: why their flagship soap opera - "Eastenders" - has fallen in ratings and now is in viewership behind not only "Coronation Street" (not from BBC) but also behind "Emmerdale" (not from BBC)?

    You could also mentioned that their TV channel BBC3 is fine and dandy!

    ;-)
  • It is pretty amazing that you can make posts and get comments so quickly. It's also pretty cool how you can have an argument/discussion over geekdom, and it draws in *more* people. Those execs like George Vezza from Nestle that see that, and tap into it are going to affect more people because they're leveraging another tool.

    For you, in particular, I think one reason that you can get so many comments and so much traffic is because you are one voice. When places like the BBC go at it, they have so many channels that they approach, it's hard to take it all in. In that regard, I think people move away then. For your blog, as readers, we can follow one spot of info, and take in what we want and disregard the rest. It's a lot easier than following a news outlet with many channels. And you post often enough that there will be something interesting soon, if the current post isn't interesting enough.

    IMHO, it seams to me that you still have a feeling that you're still just a little guy. You break out sometimes, but most of the time, you're just a guy who is writing and observing from your perspective. If you started to get corporate, and had a bunch of channels and multiple authors, I bet your audience would change a whole lot.
  • Well I am heading to bed. Have a good trip man! We can chat some other time :)
  • "What the BBC found mindblowing ......"

    Did you really mean to say that, or did you mean the representative of the BBC you met "found (it) mind blowing".
  • Goebbels
    What strikes me is that this still strikes you even when we tell you thousands of times that normal people really don't care or know about blogs that much.
  • Farewell, gl and gg, Robert.

    Wished we'd met but there's always tomorrow!
  • It's interesting to here that scobleizer has traffic levels similar to the BBC . . . and that's just one person blogging. Imagine what you could do if you had a whole TV network behind you!
  • Robert, you didn't say what the program was. Most BBC Radio programs now have 'listen again', which is sort of like podcasting I guess. But finding a 3 min interview in the haystack of Beeb output can be tricky :-)

    Talking of Beeb podcasting, check out Radio 4's "In Business":

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/news/inbusiness/inb...
  • Tim Harris
    Robert,

    What's up with the little tiny smiley at the bottom left of your page?

    Tim
  • MM the World service is quite separate (and a lot smaller) to the BBC proper - so I could well imagine Robert geting more than a world service site I doubt that he would beat terry wogan http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/shows/wogan/ though

    In Business is a good show as some one else said
  • Perhaps that you have the ability to fire off thoughts to the web without going through any editorial control is new to them.. As with all big machines the BEEB must have a huge review system for content.
  • The BBC overall get's a huge amount of traffic on their sites, but they do give statistics on one part - their news stories on news.bbc.co.uk. You can find them at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/newswatch...

    Quite interesting.
  • @Tim Harris — The little tiny smiley at the bottom left of the page, is a wordpress stats counter I believe.
    http://stats.wordpress.com/h.gif?blog=3428&...
  • Robert, I didn't hear the broadcast, but I'm sure it was worth listening to. I'm not surprised though that you have similar stats to BBC blogs. Blog audiences go for personalities, and many of their guys are small beer worldwide. In the blogosphere you are one of the top magnets.
  • BBC has a blog!? Wow, I never knew that...

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    check out my blog at
    http://spanishnow.wordpress.com
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  • Carolus Holman
    Mind blowing? Like Free Televsion? Like freeways? Like Airbags? Like LCD Screens? Like the Mouse? Like Excel? Like Windows 95? Like the Mac OS7. Where has this interviewer been? Seems like it's mind blowing that the BBC has such uninformed reporters on technology.
  • The Beeb is a big organization :) Don't take one crew's net'spertise as representative of the BBC, especially not the World Service :)
  • Deke
    Nothing mind blowing about it.

    Slashdot posts something and there are hundreds of comments in mere minutes. Where has the BBC been?
  • Karim
    Goebbles: sorry, I forgot -- when did you say you were being interviewed by the BBC again? I haven't been able to pick you up on the Volksempfänger lately. :-)

    I hear you when you say that "normal" people don't care about blogs. The BBC rarely covers things that "normal" people care about. You know, like when Angelina walked in on Brad and Jen? Major news, but not a peep from the Beeb on that. When they cover sports -- why do they call it "Sport" instead of "Sports?" They ought to learn how to speak English -- you never hear any sports "normal" people care about, like NASCAR, or professional wrestling. So of course they're gonna cover stuff nobody cares about. Like blogs.

    Bunch of arrogant bastards.
  • I like the BBC, reminds me of the CBC. The BBC has got great programming and some of its shows don't have any commercials and last 59 minutes.
  • What's mind blowing is that we all keep reading your posts...
  • How many subscribers do you have?
    Al
  • George Arney
    Actually Robert, what I really find mind-blowing (my attention has just been drawn to it by a visit to our host radio station in Seattle KUOW) is that ALL the radio services of the BBC are now freely available to everyone anywhere online. This means you can listen for free to the classical music glories of Radio 3, or the intelligent (sometimes) speech of Radio 4 --or even the international news of BBC World Service-- plus countless other fabulous commercial-free radio channels-- anywhere, anytime. I can be quite a critic of BBC things (despite having such a reassuring BBC voice!) but --if only because of the way its funded, a poll tax on the British public-- BBC radio is best. And now its available everywhere, online. Wow. Podcasting and all the new stuff is exciting. But-- especially if youre not British and you've never had the opportunity to explore what BBC domestic radio has to offer-- a whole universe is out there to be discovered.

    Thanks a lot for coming along to the library again. Hope the journey to Silicon Valley went well. Best, George.
  • Karim
    Actually, what's "mind-blowing," in the doubleplus ungood, Scanners sense, is not that the BBC radio services are freely available to everyone anywhere online.

    It's that they require Real Player.

    Nnnngghhh... Must... reach... aspirin... bottle...
  • Sounds from your last two posts that there was a lot of mutual mind-blowing going on. Are you sure that the people from the Beeb weren't, erm, pulling your plonker? I really doubt that a site like http://news.bbc.co.uk/ has the same traffic as you do. I wonder what Euan would say? I do remember nearly two years ago the BBC radio science correspondent (forgotten his name) telling me that he and his colleagues routinely checked blogs as well as chat sites for news in their area of speciality.
  • CosaNostra
    What is mind blowing is that a bonehead like you dare to compare with the BBC.
  • You might also consider adding CHAT to your blog - check out this Divine Web 2.0 Service/ Ajax Tool

    http://gabbly.com/http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/

    C'mon, and start Chatting people!
  • A blogger's dream...to have your blog mentioned by the media...and not for negative reasons, either. :-)
  • information page.
  • Very good information.


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    check out my blog at
    http://spanishnow.wordpress.com
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  • We are going to break digg, so check out the blog and see if you want to be part of Webreakdigg.
  • Its great that you have stats equivalent to BBC and considering the fact that BBC is popular worldwide.
    But when you think about BBC what immediately comes to ones mind is BBC Radio/TV or News and never their website/blog. But when we think about scobleizer then we immediately come to check your blog. So I feel it cannot be termed as mind blowing.
  • Nick Braak
    All these pendantic posts from the cyber peanut gallery. Bummer.

    Hey, I get what you are talking about and I think it's mindblowing too. And a whole lot of fun!

    And that's what we need. More fun, less fact checking.
  • I think it's pretty cool to have the premier news organization in the world come to your house library to watch you work. That never happened pre-internet.

    Regarding sheer traffic, BBC is very, very busy, #23 and drawing over 20 million visitors according to Alexa. Scobelizer is not chopped liver though (#7309).

    Here's Alexa's traffic comparison.

    I've been wondering for months why the Gabbly thing isn't taking off, searchengines.
  • Indicates to me how detached the BBC World Service is from the mainstream BBC - as an organisation as a while they're pioneers in this field Robert.
  • Dennis: I think you missed what they were impressed with. Of course they knew this was going on on the Internet. They are smart and we had interesting discussions.

    What was going on here was a bit of "the grass is greener on your side of the fence." For me it was their millions of listeners who have deep love for the BBC. For them they liked being able to send words, images, audio, and video out and have instant conversations with the audience worldwide. They don't have a system yet that lets them do that and their whole infrastructure is aimed at keeping that microphone on that little table working and making sure that ads get run and all that (they had a system that let the producers back in London talk to George).

    And, yes, I was impressed by the Beeb. It's impressive to see what they've built and how it all operates.
  • They don't quite have a system to do that, but they are working on it:

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4828336.stm

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/...
  • Today, this blog is #10 on the Technoratti top 100 - on space above Google's official blog
  • JE
    Sounds like it was a cool interview. Wish I had caught it!
  • danja
    The BBC have some of the best tech people in the world (though that doesn't necessarily include their reporters).
  • Rob
    "It’s interesting to here that scobleizer has traffic levels similar to the BBC" - It is also, of course, completely untrue. The BBC person involved was simply confused. Alexa (by no means the most reliable, but not a bad guide) ranks it as the 23rd most viewed website in the world.
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