BBC - Internet Marketing News and Blogs

In a week that that saw a rally in global stock markets and is seeing some of the best Black Friday deals in recent memory, it seems like the world has been able to recapture some sense of normalcy.

Here's the news that caught my attention this week.

Today sees the start of the BBC's online live streaming of BBC1 and BBC2, though this is something ITV has been doing for a while with its four channels.

I've been watching BBC2 through the iPlayer to see how well it works online, and whether the BBC does it better than ITV...

ITV has been adding more video content to its mobile service recently, as well as promoting it between TV programmes.

With this in mind, I decided to take a look at the site and compare it with the BBC's offering, which was upgraded earlier this year...

I spend a lot of time on newspaper and other publishers' sites, and am often amazed at how bad their site search functions can be.

A lot of sites have been redesigned over the past year or so, and have improved a lot, but their search functions can still be patchy.

Here are a few thoughts on how they could be improved...

How should a website handle errors? What kind of information and messages should be presented to the user? And will a one-size fits all approach do the job?

Our own 404 page is pretty lame, so we’ve been thinking about the various ways in which we can improve things, as part of our year-long project to provide you with a glorious new E-consultancy website (due in early-2009).

I have also analysed the 404 pages of 10 of the most popular news sites, to see how other publishers are faring.

The BBC just can't get its external links policy right, it seems, and is now denying external websites valuable link juice by the way it links out.

Patrick at Blogstorm has noticed that the site's external links, normally displayed to the right of its articles, are being passed through redirect scripts.

I discussed the economics of blogging recently, sparking a bit of debate.

And it seems for good reason. The evolution of the blogosphere as a business hasn't been easy for many of its participants.

The BBC is experimenting with the idea of linking out to external sources from within the body text of its news articles, in a trial which will last for four weeks.

Obviously this is a good idea, though why it has taken a decade for the BBC to roll out a 'trial' is anybody's guess (though it won't have done any harm to The Beeb's own Pagerank).

However, the way it is going about this is, well, a little bit Noddy...

One of the most common words to be found on sites that might be defined as being Web 2.0 is beta.

But does this mean anything to those who don’t work in the tech space and should there be a time-limit on how long a site can remain in beta?

This, he says, indicates that rather than taking away valuable page views, being generous with outbound links can actually benefit publishers by increasing the number of incoming links.