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BBC s blog expert sheds light on the whole blogging idea

Went to the first meeting of the Digital Editor s Network today, and the session on blogging that followed from Robin Hamman, the who is in charge of Online Community Management for the BBC. He s been involved in setting up the BBC Manchester blogs.
The session was very interesting and it focused mainly around Hamman s definition of blogging and also how the BBC deals with the concept of user-generated content and the costs involved in that.

It brought me back thinking again to what the pluto-online blog s should be used for next year, and the more I hear, the more I am convinced that we need blogs that really are experts in their field or have something specific to say. Not just Joe Blogs .

Hamman has three models for blogging, I hope he doesn t mind me para-phrasing them here:

1. The closed blog: These are those MySpace-style blogs that a few of us keep, read by a limited readership and to those people they are great blogs, to anyone else who stumbles amongst them they are trivial.
2. Information conduit: This is where the writer is passionate about the subject and acts as a resource, provides news, maps, mp3s, images or links to other resources. I often find Andy Dickinson s blog is a bit like this as he grapples with technology and software, it s a very useful resource.
3. It s a conversation: This is where a blog is referenced by other blogs, has comments, and becomes part of something bigger. An example is when the UCLan student unfortunately nicked some of Martin Stabe s work and put it on their blog, and subsequently it unraveled across the blogsphere.

I think that the pluto-online blogs need to be very much the information conduit, but more than anything have a particular story attached to them. They need to have that personal element, that hook, such as the student who has two kids and is trying to get through her final year in criminology while getting by on next to nothing - but it should have the information and relevant links for others in the same position. Yes, it may only attract a limited readership, but if we have lots of these blogs then the amount of readers overall will be significant. I suspect we ll also find these blogs are not just being read by the students at the University of Central Lancashire but they will also be out there and read by anyone in the same. situation.

It ll be Nigel Barlow s job as Online Features Editor to decide what direction these blogs will take, how much control the people who write the blogs have and what editorial line he decides to take.

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