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BBC Shared tags

We have built a social bookmarking tool just for BBC News that allows logged in users to tag/bookmark stories and view related stories that other users have tagged using similar terms.

If you go to any story from the front page and login as 'guest'/'guest' then you can start tagging stories and see how other people have tagged the same story.

The protoype uses XML-HTTPRequest to allow users to add tags without leaving the page and it also updates the related stories box based on applied tags so that users can see what others are doing in almost real time.

Users have their own tags page to aggregate bookmarked stories, and they can also view a global tags page showing the most popular and recent tags used by all users. There is also a tag search facility across a users' tags or the whole tag space.

For each 'tag', users can see their own stories and other peoples' stories that have been associated with a term, plus there are feeds from Del.icio.us, Technorati and Flickr that pull in content with similar tags.

Our aims for this protoype were:

1. To allow users to bookmark BBC News stories and organise them using their own categories.

2. To provide related story links based on social tagging rather than dictated by editorial. See Tom Loosemore's note here: http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/ideas/archives/2005/03/user_generated.html

3. To link outwards from tags users have applied to see related content from blogs, social bookmarks and photos.

Why build a stand-alone system rather than just use Del.icio.us or Furl? First, to ensure that it is a system for BBC News stories rather than any content: there is plenty of good content on BBC News and we thought it would be interesting to let users re-organise it according to their own interests. Second, to create a viable prototype that does not depend / place too much load on external services.

Disclaimer: This prototype was actually commissioned as a piece of work by the BBC earlier in the year

  • 12 May 2005 01:54 PM

Comments  Post a comment

  • 1.
  • On 12 May 2005 07:13 PM,
  • Pietro said:

This is really really good. As soon as I heard of backstage I thought about suggesting this, and now I see it has not only been suggested, but done.
I see still tons of little changes that could be done to make it go smoother, but is already very good.
For example it should be possible to get the news from x days before that has been tagged by y people with tag z through rss. (with each user being able to set his own x,y,z).
Also I would love to have my own log in.

A neat idea, if a still quirky in places - e.g. I accidentally added the same tag to a page twice and the tag now appears twice as page mark up.

Also, it would be handy to really have a personal log in.

One thing that caught me out was that when I did a search from the http://bbctags.headshift.com page I got a results page that just linked back to the main BBC site.

For the Firefox users with Greasemonkey installed, this http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/greasemonkey/bbctags.user.js script converts BBC news feed URLs to bbctags URLs...

  • 3.
  • On 13 May 2005 12:17 AM,
  • maxplanar said:

How do we log in?

  • 4.
  • On 13 May 2005 12:27 AM,
  • Dean said:

One area that this needs cleaning up in is the fact that the same tag can be submitted multiple times and edge others off of the screen...Unless that's a feature?

A moderation thing would be nice, but maybe against the spirit....

For example of both these check out:
http://bbctags.headshift.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=main.home&url=1/hi/business/4540939.stm

Keep up the good work :)

  • 5.
  • On 13 May 2005 09:52 AM,
  • Jeff Van Campen said:

This could be Interesting. Feedback would be good, though. I tagged one story (from withing the "Tags for this Story" interface) probaby a dozen times becuase it appeared not to be working. When I clicked "More..." I noticed that my tags had indeed been added. This could be because I'm using Firefox under Linux, however.

The same goes for removing tags. Clicking the remove button has no noticable effect until the page is reloaded.

  • 6.
  • On 13 May 2005 04:18 PM,
  • James said:

This is a great idea, and im glad to see its already been created. I think that a personal log in would be very convienient.

Hi there - thanks for the feedback so far. We are keen to improve this prototype if we can.

A few people have raised the login issue. We built the prototype assuming integration with a wider BBC login system if/when the system is properly deployed, so we didn't build a separate user management system. However, if this means more people can test the system and help us refine it then I think we should allow people to create their own logins.

We'll get onto this on Monday - watch this space!

  • 8.
  • On 15 May 2005 08:21 AM,
  • Lior said:

Don't you fear 'tag spamming'? people abusing this system to somehow change search results?

Lior

Done! You can now sign up for a personal account on the prototype site

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