The BBC’s proposed cuts to online services – involving 25% of their staff being cut alongside the closure of around 200 websites – has been defended by the Beeb’s digital chief, Erik Huggers. The Hugster, as he was doubtless known in happier times, has told The Guardian that these measures are not just an exercise in cost cutting.

"What we're saying is that we want to focus BBC Online on doing less a lot better."

In fact, Huggers says this is more a process of correction than anything else, commenting that the corporation’s big mistake was letting their online presence “sprawl”, a process he said was “a natural consequence of not being constrained by spectrum.” Huggers has identified around 400 “top-level domain” websites that will be closed or merged by 2012, and BBC Online’s new strategy also aims to double the number of times users click through to rivals’ websites to 20m a month.

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There may be quite a few BBC workers finding solace in the peace of the Blue Peter garden this afternoon as it’s been announced that online staff numbers and budgets are set to be slashed by 25%. The recommendations were made in a wide ranging strategic review of the corporation’s scope and activities headed up by director general, Mark Thompson.

There’s a raft of other suggestions in Thompson’s report – including selling off BBC magazines and cutting budgets across the board from film investment to sports rights – but sticking to all things web-based, the Guardian points out that BBC Online’s current budget stands at £112 million (€125.5 million) while the Future, Media and Technology (FM&T) division, of which BBC Online is one part, employs 1,400 staff.

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Google News has added the ability to follow a particular story closely for those who decide that they’d like to keep up with the various updates to a block of news pieces.

Google has announced the new feature through the medium of the official Google blog. It’s a relatively simple move, offering a relatively easy way to keep up with developing news stories. All you need do is “star” the story in the same way as a Gmail conversation that you’d like to maintain easy access to. The official blog from Google explains things in a fairly straightforward manner,

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Rupert Murdoch’s stance against news aggregators has kicked up a notch with news that his own company, News Corp, is now actively blocking links from UK-based aggregator NewsNow.

Seems like a dodgy idea to us Rupert...

Strange as it might seem, the Guardian is reporting that News Corp is now refusing traffic from the popular news aggregator. It’s curious stuff, though Murdoch’s own, oft-stated view that news aggregators steal traffic from content producers seems to be the reason behind the new block on links. Perhaps most interesting isn’t just that all of this is happening, but that the aggregator in question, NewsNow, has decided not to take things lying down.

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Despite numerous reports indicating that the service has stalled, Twitter’s co-founder has pointed out that yesterday was the service’s busiest day ever, and that he expects tomorrow to be better still.

Anyone else been seeing an awful lot of this lad in the last couple of weeks?

It seems the rumours of Twitter’s gradual death over the coming months had been greatly exaggerated, with TechCrunch reporting that Twitter has seen record amounts of traffic over the last few days, and indeed, those using the micro-blogging service seem increasingly engaged by it. The news casts aspersions over those reports from various analysts indicating that the service’s growth had slowed significantly, with many intimating that the service could be dying a slow death.

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Google has been awarded the fairly impressive “Word of the Decade” from the American Dialect Society for the use of the noun “Google” as a verb, as in, “to Google something.”

The news comes via TomsHardware that, while Google managed to grab the word of the decade prize, “Tweet” has managed to become the word of the year, we’d imagine thanks to the unusually volume of coverage that news agencies have given Twitter over the last year or so. If nothing else, the fact that both the word of the year and word of the decade went to web-based companies is interesting.

We’re big fans of lists here in the office, so we thought we’d post a list of some of the various words and terms that have made the American Dialect Society’s shortlist for words and phrases that could have made it as word of the year this year.

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Google is showing off what it calls a “Living Story,” which it says could well be the “future of news” that just about everyone is anxious to see about… especially publishers, likely by now tired of hearing that the internet would kill paper-based news.

The response from Google to publishers who, it seems, feel increasingly as though Rupert Murdoch was correct when he said that news aggregators are essentially stealing their content, has been to bend over backwards in an attempt to offer publishers something they could appreciate rather than fear. The result seems to have been Google offering “Living Stories.” Google explained how the new concept works on the Official Google Blog, saying,

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Yahoo has decided to start giving its users the option to choose whether or not they’d like to see targeted advertising on the company’s pages.

Yahoo has been moving with some interesting developments ever since its search deal with Microsoft, whereby it’s to provide advertising to Microsoft’s rebranded version of MSN Live Search, Bing. In exchange, Bing is to handle searching for Yahoo, which leaves Yahoo to tell the world that it was never a search engine, instead it’s all about setting up a portal page that people can use to access their various different services (from news to Facebook).

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Yahoo is to push further into Facebook integration than it already has in the first half of 2010. It’s announced that it is to start “deeply” integrating Facebook Connect with its own services, including Mail and News.

Earlier this year, Yahoo told us all that it wasn’t a search company, which raised all kinds of questions about how it had managed to gain such a substantial block of the search market. It then rebranded itself as a kind of ultimate homepage, boasting news, mail and support for users to post Facebook status updates without having to leave Yahoo’s own page, which means more people spending more time on Yahoo… something it clearly wanted.

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Anti-Google rumblings from News Corps’ Rupert Murdoch have precipitated the discussions between the news giant and Microsoft about the current search arrangement that could see News Corp de-listed from Google.

Deep in consideration.

According to a Financial Times report, it looks as though what had originally been a half-joking rumour early last week may actually be developing into something a little more real. Apparently, Microsoft has approached some big web-based publishers with an eye towards having them voluntarily de-list their work from Google in an attempt to score some exclusive content for Microsoft’s own search engine, Bing.

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