Tomorrow the BBC launches its new home page. It’s been available to look at for a little while though, and still is today at bbc.co.uk/home/beta.

I think it’s pretty good - it’s nice to be able to move things around, do away with some of the content that’s not so interesting to me and even choose a colour. However, the customisation could go a little further as develops further.

• Living in Durham, that’s the weather I’d like to have on the front page. But I’d like to add BBC Tees or BBC Radio Suffolk in the radio box (or ‘category’). The home page only gives the option of BBC Radio Newcastle - it’s not possible to edit the stations to either select additional locals, or remove nationals like Radio 1 or Radio 3.
• I can untick ‘Childrens’ content for the home page, but CBBC and CBeebies still appear in the TV box. It’d be nice to add and drop TV channels.
• The blogs box is great - allowing you to add in BBC Internet Blog, Ouch!, dot.life or anything else, but a featured post still appears from PM. Can we have a radio button to say if we’re middle class or not, and therefore get Five Live Drive instead?
• It also seems a little pointless without the featured blog post title - it simply tells me at the moment “We’re keen to hear if you have any experience in this area.” - what area? GMail has a pretty good feature in webclips where you can choose the content that’s displayed at the top of the inbox. I understand why they’re pushing that content, though.
• Why isn’t there a Jon Holmes box?
• Eventually, it would be great if this could be more local. There’s no content from BBC Look North or BBC Tees, the music box features Radio 1 and something from Radio Derby, but nothing from my local BBC Introducing programme.

Going further, it would be nice if all the BBC ‘blogs’ were in the format found on the BBC Internet Blog and national radio programmes. At the moment, local radio blogs appear to be just content pages - no RSS feed, no comments, no pingback, no archive, no categories etc.

Overall it’s a nice improvement and I’ll probably use the BBC home page more than before, but it would be nice to have just a little more control. And that Jon Holmes box.

On this blog I’ve spoken about the value of adding a blog, and other social media to a website. Something I’ve not yet talked about is a forum - or message board - that allows contributors to come online and discuss any topic they like. It takes minutes to install an open-source package like phpBB, and maybe a day or two to really get things looking good, but the long term effort is often underestimated.

Sandown High School on the Isle of Wight has taken down its forum and website following undesirable links on the forum (story on Metro.co.uk). It tuns out these are just spam messages that come up on blogs and forums automatically everywhere, but in the radio report I heard, this wasn’t mentioned.

• Do you really need a forum? What value is a forum going to add to your website? Is there another way of getting this information out, such as responding to emails by posting them on a good FAQ section, or by having “open threads” on a weblog with good spam filters, a semi-focussed discussion etc.
• Will you have time to look after it? Many businesses start a forum, and then it seems to be forgotten about. This could be one of the reasons for the downfall of Yahoo! Podcasts - apparently the community were coming on with bug reports and questions, but no one was responding to them. Even worse, if current or prospective customers post to a forum and no one replies, what is the support going to be like? Rather than let someone create an account, describe their problem and check back frequently, only to find no-one seems to care, it’s probably better not to do it at all.
• How secure is the software; what’s the spam protection? This could be the thing that caught out Sandown High School’s forum. They use phpBB, and the number of phpBB forums I see full of spam messages is staggering. I’m not saying phpBB is bad software - but it’s worth signing up for the email newsletters and keeping the software up-to-date, and check out the documentation to see how you can make it secure and keep out spam.
• Is open membership appropriate? In this case, it might have been worth a member of IT or the website team checking out the new registrations every morning. Blocking those with hotmail and gmail.com addresses isn’t a great idea, and those CAPTCHA images can be awful. Minimise the effort required to allow people access, but as you’re inviting them into your house, it’s your job to keep the undesirable stuff out, not make it difficult for genuine users and easy for you.
• Do you want to manage a forum? Forums are a great place to grow a community and have discussions. However, there will be undesirable members posting questionable content. Check out some guides and forums on looking after a community, ensure you have clear rules, and don’t be afraid to remove even very popular members of that community.

Forums are a good idea in general, but without proper attention from moderators or owners they can look deserted, full of useless content and even get you into the news when something goes wrong, as has here. Not everyone will understand the workings of a forum and automated spam - ensure you don’t have to explain it.

I talk all the time about how small businesses can use great content on information pages, articles or blogs to attract more traffic. On the Digg home page right now is “Plan Your Own Ergonomic Workstation“, which links to a page on Ergotron’s website. You can choose your height, and the page will display an image with the measurements you need to setup your workspace correctly.

I’ve been looking at the Ergotron stands for a new monitor, but by putting something simple like this on the website Ergotron can hope to attract new visitors who perhaps hadn’t thought about ergonomics. Even if the majority go off and adjust their desks, or find a Yellow Pages to put under the monitor, I’d think many visitors will check out their products.

One of the great things about Amazon and ebuyer (and many other stores) is the reviews available to those looking for real world information about a product. Magazines get products to try out then return, but the item is only in their possession for a short amount of time, and these products are supplied specifically for testing by journalists.

The Top Gear Survey is built on this premise. They get a car and drive it round some corners quickly, but what’s it actually like day to day? And what are the dealers like? This scenario actually works out quite well - a motoring journalist will know what to look for and can give you some information on the stats, and the owner can complement this with how it performs after a few months, how it copes in everything the weather has to throw at it and so on.

A few years ago I read a piece about reviews on Amazon. The journalist had looked up a number of books, DVDs and other items on sites like Amazon and found many had consumer reviews before they’d even gone on the market. After that I wondered if the product I was looking at on a site had been reviewed by staff in an effort to shift stock, or whether it was a genuine review. Now with so many forums and tools like Technorati and Google Blog Search, it’s become a bit easier to cast a wider net when looking for opinions.

Simon Calder (apparently “the man who pays his way”) is the travel editor for the Independent. Previously on Radio 2 at an hour I was always asleep, he’s moved up to Mo Dutta’s show between 6am and 8am on Saturday and I have to say I consistently enjoy Simon’s discussions on everything travel. The reporting is always straight and honest, with nothing unnecessary thrown in.

This week in the Independent, Simon talks about trusting the reviews on travel websites, following news from Holiday Which? that the reviews might not be as honest as you think and posing a question over the tactics some hoteliers might go to for good write up. My immediate thoughts were around the target audience of these sites and a magazine such as Holiday Which? who conducted the research.

In defense of the sites, magazines might have one or more reviewers in a particular time scale. Considering the gap between the visit and getting the magazine through peoples doors, the travel sites might do better on recent information if the hotel was suffering a staff shortage, or building work. Another benefit the sites have is seeing “I took my grand children to the hotel…” to “After my girlfriend and I got our A level results…”. In looking for accommodation recently I made extensive use of TripAdvisor, starting off by looking up the hotels Expedia came back with, then used TripAdvisor’s ratings to find prices for hotels visitors had rated highly.

After a while I noticed myself ignoring the 4 and 5 star reviews and hunting out the bad ones. Now I think about it, I suppose I justify that approach by saying that for £80 the hotel should to be nice, with a decent room and good staff . There were some genuine bad stories - one hotel I looked at had rooms backing on to a courtyard which was extremely noisy with drinkers and air conditioning units at 2am. Get a room at the front and the views might be amazing and “the traffic was relatively quiet”. Some criticisms of another hotel might revolve around something like room size and “only a foot and a half around the bed”. Walking around the bed is something I can do at home - I can live with that for a few days.

Simon finishes the article by saying “Even so, anyone considering a large investment like a holiday, who relies exclusively on the opinions of unidentifiable individuals, would be mad not to consult friends, family, guidebooks and a good travel agent.”

Having not consulted any of those four, I hope the reviews online turn out to be right. I’ll post my own when I get back next week. =)

If you’re interested in my persuits whilst I’m away, you can follow me on my Tumblelog at jmsbrrg.com and see photos on my flickr account.

And it’s great. I just found a copy of the Guardian from August in a bag I’m packing at the moment and was thinking about the design they recently introduced. Personally I like the size, and find the fonts easy to read even at 11pm when my eyes are tired. Comparing it to other broadsheets, I think they’ve got it just right. It’s also a co-incidence that just this morning I was thinking the Guardian site had a different front page to a lot of the site, and comment areas appear in three very different styles.

I check out the Organ Grinder blog on media every day and love what they’ve done with it. I think the way the titles of the posts are done is better - now loading with no delay. The categories down the left hand side are very clear and tidy, although I’m not sure how well the red links on grey down the right hand side work. The comments are now formatted in the familiar style from Comment is Free, and they’re much easier to read as a result.

The formatting of posts is very nice indeed. Whilst the trend is to add buttons for the major social sites, or a share button to open a box with dozens of buttons, they’ve stuck with just Digg and del.icio.us, which are certainly the tools I use most for blog posts. Props for plain text links too. There’s also a link to see what’s being said about a post (”Conversations about this post”). This is very worth while when you gather almost 7,000 diggs on a blog post like Charlie Brooker’s I Hate Macs.

I believe the Guardian are doing a lot of work at the moment on the website and look forward to seeing how the rest looks. I’m a big fan of the new Times Online site and think the broadsheets have responded very well with the challenges of putting together sites (see Independent, Telegraph, New York Times, USA Today) which look great, have some familiarity with the paper edition and innovate with new types of content like blogs and podcasts.

Last week on the MediaTalk podcast (look at that smooth segue), Emily Bell mentioned the video player on the Telegraph site. I’ve not been the quickest to adopt viewing these channels, but the Telegraph video player is so well done I’ve gone back a few times. It’s worth noting how these flash players contrast with traditional Microsoft and Real delivery. Just look at what CNN are doing and compare it to the “beta” player from MSNBC. I find Flash is often quick and convenient, especially as it doesn’t interfere with anything else I’m doing. In Vista when I watch the BBC video content I lose sound, the screen goes black for a few seconds and it all comes back with the basic theme. Close the window and the same thing happens again.

I think this extends past a technology choice on the website. The video podcasts from ABC and CNN are very clean and they clearly understand the differences between viewing online and on TV. MSNBC only make available audio highlights from shows like Countdown with Keith Olbermann, even though the clips are incredibly popular online on YouTube or other video sites.

It’s a really exciting time for online content. When ABC and CNN are moving forward, it still seems strange that the BBC would move backwards.

Last week Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, appeared on Radio 4’s You and Yours to discuss the internet. It was a fairly interesting discussion, where comments ranged from “The internet is wonderful, you can find anything” to “It’s an invention worse than the atom bomb”, a reference to its impact on traditional businesses.

Broadly speaking, the premise of the book is that the internet is home to “amateur content”. The majority of blogs are full of opinion where the facts aren’t checked and authors can’t be held to account, whilst sites like Wikipedia contain a lot of misinformation. Another issue addressed is that content creators, artists ad musicians are finding it harder to earn a living thanks to the internet.

It’s an interesting discussion and one worth reading about. I think crowd based news websites mean we’re seeing more stories than we might do if we relied solely on a newspaper and TV channel. For example, I wouldn’t know who Ron Paul was if I wasn’t a visitor to Digg. You would do well by starting with this discussion with Andrew Keen and Emily Bell, digital content director at the Guardian. Andrew Keen v Emily Bell - Is today’s internet killing our culture?

I’ve decided to concentrate on all things technology and web related here, and move my personal stuff off to Twitter and Tumblr. The nature of those platforms demands the short posts, which will hopefully help me concentrate on designing and Ruby on Rails - two areas I really want to get into - and spending more time on web and tech related topics here.

My tumblelog is located at jmsbrrg.com. I’ll probably update it at least once a day, and having thought about tumblr (hosted) or gelato (self-hosted), tumblr won for the features and being able to post easily from a mobile. I’m away in Berlin in September and hope to do lots of mobile blogging with photos and audio, and plan to try a few different platforms out.

I think most web developers / designers have worked with at least one eCommerce platform. Up to now, the choice has been fairly good and many, many stores run on Zen Cart or osCommerce. The thing is, a lot seem to look the same, and the majority of individual stores don’t always seem to be treated with the love and care of some others on entry level paid platforms.

Personally, I really like the open source platforms because it brings new and interesting products online and allows owners of small High Street stores to join the online retailers. It works best when the products are unique mind; there must be 100’s of electronics stores online.

I’ve just been reading through the website for Magento - a new open source eCommerce platform. A few things stick out at first glance. The main developers actually develop very good eCommerce sites at the moment, and they talk about online stores not being a cookie-cutter experience.

As for the administration area, the screenshots and features look excellent. I can’t wait to download Beta 1 and start developing an example website with it.

I’ve been thinking of how I can post pictures, videos and short text snippets from my notebook and mobile phone whilst away. I’d like to use this blog to concentrate on comment on the articles and podcasts and anything else exciting, so it’ll all be personal stuff. Looks like tumblr is the answer.

This also links in with the research I’ve been doing for the blogging episodes of the WebKanix podcast. Should you go with a hosted service like Typepad or WordPress.com, or consider hosting Movable Type or WordPress yourself. I have really mixed feelings at the moment.

My project management is hosted on GoPlan, yet I host all my blogs on hosting I control. I put all my photos on Flickr (as opposed to a gallery here), use Google Analytics and am now really excited about having a Tumblelog to hold the personal stuff. The thing is, I’m not sure whether to go with tumblr (and how to link that in with a domain, or leave it on their domain) or whether to go with gelato cms which I can host.

I think the doubt comes from the content and where it is. If something happened to my Flickr account, I have all my photos anyway and can just upload them somewhere else. I have (very basic) log analysis tools for raw data if I can’t access Analytics, and losing GoPlan wouldn’t be the end of the world. But in two years time (if I post once a day) almost 700 entries of text, quotes, links and other posts might be out of my control if I wanted to put it somewhere else.

At the moment I can’t draw a conclusion. I’ll try out tumblr and gelato over the next fortnight and see which I prefer (if tumblr is good enough for Kevin Rose it should be a no brainer, really). As far as blogs go, I think self-hosted is always best. You can reap the benefits from all those inbound links and even if you use Blogger for the actual authoring, you can have it FTP’d automatically to your site.

Twitter is a free social networking service which works with small messages. You might use it as a very brief blog, or to develop a webapp with considering the cool tie-in with SMS messages.

Getting a message out is pretty easy - you can do it from GTalk or Jabber, log into twitter.com, or the really cool one - send a SMS message to the Twitter number. So many providers give an allocation of free text messages (an Orange pay as you go SIM pack on my desk has 300 free texts a month) that you can update several times a day and not pay for it.

Curiosity got the best of me, so I signed up, made a test update and then placed some code in the sidebar here. I took the JavaScript badge offered on the site and crowbarred it into the existing XHTML code for the sidebar, and updates are shown under the flickr thumbnails on the right.

I’m really excited by this - and it’s got me thinking about all the possibilities. You can subscribe and follow me on Twitter itself, via RSS and if I make an update you get an SMS message. And if that wasn’t enough, you can make yourself appear popular by following an often updated Sky News and getting a lot of text messages.

You can follow me on Twitter, read this excellent introduction, find out if (and why) you should care, or consider the alternatives like Jaiku which looks very cool too.

Update 15:33 - I’ve been thinking about different ways to use Twitter to send SMS notifications on all sorts of sites. Users obviously have to be signed up to Twitter and following you, but these look pretty interesting. WordPress plugin to send a status update when you create or edit a post - Twitter Updater. If you’re using another blog, or maybe want to send any RSS feed (like Podcasts, press releases, updates to an event, etc) you can do so with twitterfeed.