The BBC moves in mysterious ways regarding blogs, it often seems to me.
Earlier this week, one of the BBC’s UK domestic radio stations, Radio Five Live, introduced a blog on the Up All Night radio show website.
It’s called the Technology Blog with the strapline "Keep up with the latest gadgets, games and gizmos." It has no trackback capability, however, and to comment you have to send an email (through a form).
It does have an RSS feed (good move), but the link to it isn’t anywhere visible on the site and it’s not auto-discoverable according to FeedDemon which couldn’t find it. However, the live bookmark feature in Firefox did: http://www.bbc.co.uk/fivelive/technology/blog/rss.xml
It’s really great that the BCC website overall has readily embraced so much of new media channels like RSS – the BBC News site, for instance, lists 17 feeds you can subscribe to.
Yet when it comes to blogs, they don’t seem to do it properly. No, this isn’t a rigid view on the standard definition of a blog. It’s more about if you’re going to introduce a blog, why not do it properly so as to make it as easy as possible for visitors to engage in conversations and connect to what you have to say?
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FYI: The latest version of FeedDemon (1.5) does auto-discover the feed.
Thanks Nick. Hmm. I do have FeedDemon 1.5 but it would not auto-discover that feed.
But I guess I did it wrong. What I did was include the root URL (http://www.bbc.co.uk/fivelive/technology/blog/) into the ‘add new channel’ dialog in FeedDemon. Just did it again and it still produces this error alert:
“The feed URL could not be auto-discovered. The site may not have a feed, or it may not support auto-discovery of its feed.”
Then I tried it with the main site page URL (http://www.bbc.co.uk/fivelive/technology/blog/20050407.shtml). This times, it worked!