Posted by Ben.

The BBC has set up a dedicated internet blog (all blogs seem to end up being about the internet, don’t they?) to ‘talk about issues raised by you about the technology behind bbc.co.uk, [their] mobile services and the BBC’s presence on the internet.’

I was particularly struck by their rationale, which touches on a couple of interesting issues around blogging as debate tool:

‘The BBC has always had a commitment to engaging with our audience, and we now receive millions of inbound messages a day across email, message boards and blog postings, but I think we have been slow to embrace blogs as a way of discussing our strategy and direction. This often leads to the debate happening elsewhere, based often on only half the information, and without our being able fully to join in the debate. We’ve not done ourselves any favours, and we want to use this blog to re-engage with our friends and critics.’

There’s something of a double-edged sword or dilemma or something here: there’s a lot of encouraging and sensible talk at the moment about going to where your audience are and participating in conversations across diverse, disperse locations. This is a great principle, especially in combating the all-too-common attitude of ‘build it and they will come’ (they invariably won’t). However, it’s hard to accuse the BBC of failing to go to the aforementioned disperse locations when they are themselves one of the most prominent existing places that people visit to start and join conversations. Which is why I think their aspiration of using blogging to at once inform and listen to people is both laudable and sensible… but now I’m starting to trespass on a post I know Gez is putting together about blogging as consultation tool, so he can pick up on that bit.

Suffice to say we’ve advocated and been involved in both approaches — aggregating disparate conversations and creating new, comprehensive sites for them to take place — and it’s (predictably) a case of horses for courses. Judging by the 218 comments on their ‘Linux Figures’ entry, it looks as though the BBC have backed the right horse for their course.