"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.

“We need to be more focused, and do it much better… we need to improve the quality level, and reprioritise on what we do best,” said Huggers, later adding, “We’re not saying we’re cutting niche parts. What we’re saying is that we want to focus BBC Online on doing less a lot better. The point about commercial rivals is an important one. We don’t define our mission by simply meeting market failure but we do understand we need to leave greater space for others.”

Speaking with regards to the click through rates, Huggers said, “Fundamentally, this strategy is not about hoarding traffic or duplicating what else is out there. It is about focusing on our strengths, and making BBC Online what it should be, part of the fabric of a wider web rather than all things to all men.

“I’m not saying we should retreat from digital, it’s fundamentally about focusing on why we exist and that should define what we do. And I think we can do this more responsibly, and with less money. I think these proposals will put the service in better shape, which is why I proposed them.”

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.

“If implemented, this cutback in the scope and budget of the BBC’s web operation will be welcomed by commercial rivals, particularly given that last year the BBC Trust sanctioned a 27% increase in the corporation’s annual online budget to more than £145 million (€162.5 million) per year over a three-year period,” points out The Guardian.

Indeed, the fact that this is being reported on The Guardian may well be striking a chord with staff in there considering there has been widespread reports that the cost of their online operations – which gain 1.9 million unique browsers per day on average – is causing a massive strain on the Guardian Media Group. As The Observer reinvented itself in a new slimmer format last week, and regional titles were sold off, more cuts may be on the way there too. But that’s a tale for another day.

One other measure that may be in the pipeline will see the BBC will introduce a hyperlink on every webpage it publishes to funnel more traffic to commercial services, a move FM&T chief Erik Huggers (great name) indicated was on the cards in an interview in December. This came after the BBC Trust heavily criticised the BBC website in 2008 for failing in its role to act as a “trusted guide” to the internet and hoarding web traffic.

We love what the Beeb do online and hopefully this won’t affect the quality of news and features we’ve come to expect. Your thoughts? Remember you can win a shiny prize if we like your comment…

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,

“Users can mark a story by clicking on the star next to it, like they can with messages in Gmail and items in Google Reader. When you star a story in Google News, it’s one way to let us know you’re interested in that subject. When there are significant updates, we will alert you by putting the headline in bold so you can get more information. You can also follow your most recent starred stories in the “Starred” section of Google News.”

As we said above, it’s all very simple, but it’s something that should genuinely help ensure that Google News updates find their way to the folks who actually want to hear about them… custom news is always a nice thing to have.

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.

Instead, NewsNow has decided to fight back, putting together a campaign supporting the right to link on the web, named, aptly enough, right2link.org (we’ve exercised our right to link there, as long as that’s alright with everyone). The page itself boasts the very simple explanatory text,

“Whether you are a consumer, an NGO, a blogger, an independent researcher, a concerned citizen or a business, your right to link needs protection.”

Certainly, its easy to take the point of view that it’s all very convenient that the first to launch a “right to link” campaign be those whose business model is based on linking to other people’s content, but the fact is that, in many cases, they make a very compelling argument.

The big question will be just how far News Corp goes in its attempts to block links from those it feels are “stealing” its content for news aggregation services. The fact is that those services do provide a fairly hefty amount of traffic for news pages, and we’d be genuinely surprised if News Corp didn’t encounter some fairly hefty falls in readership once it moves to have itself de-listed… until then, we’ll just have to wait and see.

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.

Of course, as the folks at TechCrunch are very quick to point out, most of those reports that indicate a stall in Twitter’s growth can’t take into account the vast amount of traffic that Twitter sees from applications that bypass the site itself, using the Twitter API to post directly.

That much alone is interesting, considering the number of people who use Twitter almost exclusively from their smartphones, or by text, to say nothing of those for whom the web interface is just a little too unreliable. The number of Twitter users who opt to use standalone clients, if only for the sake of convenience and notification of messages, means that those users who make use of Twitter most are likely the ones using standalone Twitter clients…

Still, it’s interesting to see that it no longer takes a massive news event to break Twitter’s traffic record. That much alone says a lot about the way in which those regular users that Twitter has accumulated use the service.

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.

Perhaps most interesting of the suggestions is the simple suffix, “er,” which is so often appended to one syllable words to describe a movement, as in the case of “birther,” “deather,” and “truther.” Each a little stranger than the last. Similarly, the use of the word “Fail” as an exclamation has made the list.

Perhaps the most interesting and curious is the turn of phrase, “Dracula sneeze,” which apparently describes the process by which a person covers their “mouth with the crook of one’s elbow when sneezing, seen as similar to popular portrayals of the vampire Dracula, in which he hides the lower half of his face with a cape.”

We were curious to see that both “blog” and “Wi-fi” were also on the list of contenders for word of the decade, though in truth neither seemed very likely to beat Google. We were also happy to see “sext” on the list of “most outrageous” words to emerge this year.

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,

“The idea behind Living Stories is to experiment with a different format for presenting news coverage online. News organisations produce a wealth of information that we all value access to this information should be as great as the online medium allows. A typical newspaper article leads with the most important and interesting news, and follows with additional information of decreasing importance.”

The idea is that, instead of having to repeat information for every new viewer, a Living Story simply adds updates to a timeline, meaning that readers who have already read to a certain point in a particular piece of coverage can simply pick up and continue reading the developments since their last reading. It’s an interesting idea, and certainly one that publishers might appreciate as it helps organise content, but for now we’re curious to see just who decides to take it on.

If you’d like to investigate Google’s Living Stories in a little more detail then you can check out Google’s blog post about the new format for news viewing.

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).

As it stands, Yahoo pulls information from the various services that its users make use of from the portal page to ensure that its advertising is well targeted, but now it seems that users will be able to choose not to have that kind of depth of tailor-made advertising. Now though, BrandRepublic is posting that users are to be able to opet out of targeted ads altogether.

Yahoo’s new options include an Ad Manager, which basically allows users to add categories that they feel Yahoo is missing, helping to make sure that the whole service is a bit more effective when it comes to advertising. The opposite side of the Ad Manager, which likely won’t be helping make Yahoo to much money, is that it also allows you to uncheck all of its boxes, in which case you see no targeted advertising at all.

Of course, we imagine that fairly few people will be bothering to make sure they don’t see any targeted ads at all, but it’s always nice to have the option. We assume Yahoo still manages to grab a massive amount of data from the various different services that its users access through Yahoo’s portal page.

If you’d like to read more, you can check out the BrandRepublic post on the new advertising setup at Yahoo.

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.

Now though, it seems that Yahoo has decided that it’s so pleased with the results of its Facebook integration that it wants to go that bit further in 2010, adding more Facebook functionality to Yahoo services. As well you might have guessed, some portion of this functionality will be the ability to share Yahoo’s content (or at the very least, links to Yahoo’s content) across Facebook.

Yahoo’s blog post on the topic is fairly unrevealing about just what else we can expect to see Yahoo doing with Facebook integration, saying only that,

“As the place where over 500 million people visit every month, Yahoo!’s goal is to bring together social experiences from across the web, and provide one place for people to access information and stay in touch with the people they care about the most.”

If we apply a little bit of a callous-filter to that, what they’re hoping to manage here seems to be that people spend more time on Yahoo’s own pages, and less time moving around the web at large. Seems fairly straightforward, but then, that’s not really how blog posts from massive corporate entities work, I’d imagine.

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.

It might seem a strange move, but clearly it’s one that Microsoft could stand to benefit from, particularly among hardcore news-junkies, who could well follow top publishers from one search engine to another.

The big question will likely be whether or not Microsoft can offer news publishers quite enough to make them want to de-list themselves from Google, from which they’re clearly seeing plenty of traffic already.

The fact is that, while Bing has been growing steadily since its launch in May, it’s still only managed to garner around 10% of the US domestic search market, and significantly less than that figure worldwide. It’s certainly an interesting plan from Microsoft’s point of view, but it seems as though there’d have to be fair whack of cold hard currency behind any offer involving being de-listed from Google before any publishers took it seriously.

Of course, Google has responded already, saying of news, “Economically it’s not a big part of how we generate revenue.”

According to the YouTube Blog post about the new service, its development was motivated by the fact that a significant amount of the footage we see from elections, earthquakes, fires and other natural disasters comes from people just pulling out a phone or a camera and hitting the record button.

According to the folks at YouTube, the new service allows for “media organisations to request, review and rebroadcast YouTube clips directly from YouTube users.” The aim seems to be to provide more access to content for those assembling new stories, which should mean that we see more and more video clips starting to crop up in our web-based news.

Essentially, the service kind of bypasses YouTube uploading in the first place, allowing news organisations to request content from their readers directly. From there, users are able to submit their content directly via a YouTube-style upload function that goes directly to the organisation. Those clips are also posted to YouTube and tagged accordingly.

For now there’s no solid word on just how YouTube Direct will work for television-based news (strange to have to make that distinction) beyond the fact that it allows news organisations to request the content from users in high quality for rebroadcast, but we imagine that the two will cross one another sooner or later. So far, the list of those organisations involved is relatively short, but boasts some big names, including the Huffington Post, NPR, the Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle.

For those with an interest, you can check out YouTube Direct in a little more detail over at the YouTube blog post on the new project, or you can check out the video below.

Murdoch had, in the past, essentially accused news aggregators like Google of living off the content that companies like News Corp paid to have produced. Murdoch seemed to be of the opinion that Google should, for some reason, be paying news sites to display their content, rather than getting a “free ride.” This is what led to the claim yesterday that Murdoch might have his sites removed from Google’s indexes.

Murdoch’s exact statement, according to the Telegraph, essentially said, “The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories – they just take them. That’s Google, that’s Microsoft, that’s Ask.com, a whole lot of people … they shouldn’t have had it free all the time, and I think we’ve been asleep.”

The response from Google is pretty much exactly the same as the responses from just about everyone else with an understanding of how the internet at large works when it comes to content. According to the Telegraph, a Google spokesman said,

“Google News and web search are a tremendous source of promotion for news organisations, sending them about 100,000 clicks every minute… Publishers put their content on the web because they want it to be found, so very few choose not to include their material in Google News and web search. But if they tell us not to include it, we don’t.”

So, now all we have to do is wait and see if Murdoch responds to Google at all… in truth we don’t really expect News Corp to be delisted from Google intentionally. It seems a very silly move to make, but it wouldn’t be the first time a massive company has made a serious misstep when it comes to web based stuff.

You can read more over at the Telegraph, it’s a strange situation, but Google seems relatively happy to ditch News Corp’s sites from its listings.

According to a Cnet report, Bartz was open and frank about the company’s position at the moment, saying that, “Yahoo was the big shining star in the mid-1990s and mid-2000s, and then somehow we weren’t so shiny anymore.” It’s no real surprise that Yahoo is being so honest, given its recent push to rebrand itself as a kind of universal homepage rather than a search engine.

Yahoo has revealed some interesting facts about its recent redesgin too, pointing out that the new homepage (which boasts support integration with Facebook and news feeds, for those curious about such things) has managed to increase the average amount of time spent on the site by fully 20%.

Of course, the real question will be whether or not that increased time-on-site will be maintainable as the new layout starts to sink in. It’s entirely possible that Yahoo’s in the average time spent looking at the homepage is being bumped by the curiosity and general confusion about the new setup.

Once the new homepage is properly established and we start to see just how big an impact it’s had on Yahoo’s business then we’ll have some far more interesting statistics. Still, it’s hard to avoid the massive impact that Bart’s statement about Yahoo’s current state has when she says, “We are a 14-year-old Internet company that somehow got boring.”

Anyone interested in more details about just what Yahoo is doing should check out the Cnet article on it. There’s an awful lot of detail on Yahoo’s ongoing attempt to rebrand itself as a kind of an ultimate homepage, rather than a search page.

The Telegraph is carrying the story that the document, weighing in at a truly staggering 2,400 pages, has managed to be leaked to the web and is now available to be viewed by… well, enemy spies, rogue agents, black operations and anyone who just wants to give it a look and see what’s going on in the Ministry of Defence about leaks and that.

It’s particularly interesting that The Telegraph goes into so much detail about the negative treatment of journalists in the document, with them apparently being classed as a “threat.” For our money, the far more interesting fact is that those sections of the document talking about leaks of official documents say something along the lines of,

“Leaks usually take the form of reports in the public media which appear to involve the unauthorised disclosure of official information (whether protectively marked or not) that causes political harm or embarrassment to the UK Government or the Department concerned…”

One has to wonder just where web-based additions to projects like WikiLeaks (where you can currently find the document on how to make sure things don’t leak) fit into that kind of diagram of a leak.

Certainly, we don’t intend to go sifting through 2,400 pages of impressive documentation on how to make sure nobody outside your secret clubhouse gets to read your impressive documentation, but with that kind of length you have to wonder if the sheer amount of text is an anti-leak tactic in itself. Now that we have the leaked document, there’s not too much we can do with it until some poor soul sits down and summarises it…

If you’d like to actually try reading the, you can find a link to the leaked document in the Telegraph’s article on it.

For now, the feature is under the Google Labs tab, which generally means things aren’t finished or are under testing, but from what we’ve seen Fast Flip seems to be fairly robust. Basically it represents a collage of different publications’ articles all represented in a single Google style search, but as soon as you click through to an article you’re presented with it already loaded in a centralised column. Users can then use the Fast Flip tabs to move back and forth between articles as though they were pages in a magazine.

While it’s something we’re not sure will catch on, it’s certainly a very worthwhile endeavour. As the Google blog post about Fast Flip points out, a lot of news websites at the moment require a far whack of time to load up, and reload a significant amount just clicking through to articles from the main page, etc. Google’s Fast Flip avoids that.

Of course, the biggest issue with Fast Flip is that it’s not like the standard Google News feed, and so it can only use content from those publishers Google has made deals with. Admittedly, those publishers include the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post and Newsweek, so it’s not like the dearth of content will necessarily mean a lack of quality.

Fast Flip is well worth checking out, if only to see just how well it works. If you’re interested in more details then you should check out Google’s blog post on Fast Flip, which includes details on the mobile version of the new service for Android devices.