I think the web services delivered by the BBC are excellent and the quality of their web services is very high, even more remarkable when you consider that the technical folk at the BBC are constrained in what they can do as a large part of their services are outsourced . However they come up with some imaginative solutions to get around this. So I was interested in reading an article in the Media section of the Guardian about the new look BBC home page. It will allow users to customise the range and detail of content, and is made up of moveable widgets to determine the layout of the page. It looks good and I have already customised my own BBC page
Richard Titmus from the BBC explains the thinking behind the new look homepage.
From a conceptual point of view, the widgetization adopted by Facebook,iGoogle and netvibes weighed strongly on our initial thinking. We wanted to build the foundation and DNA of the new site in line with the ongoing trend and evolution of the Internet towards dynamically generated and syndicable content through technologies like RSS, atom and xml. This trend essentially abstracts the content from its presentation and distribution, atomizing content into a feed-based universe. Browsers, devices, etc therefore become lenses through which this content can be collected, tailored and consumed by the audience.
Filed under: Web
But the BBC has no web services (RSS via backstage doesn’t could) – they publish a series of static html page. There isn’t an underlying API, no opportunity to serialize the data in a different format nor expose an api. It’s all rather sad and dated, and is only possible because they layer in lots of people (who in the main have no idea what the internet is about). Its all rather sad. And very expensive.