Casting my all-knowing gaze over the BBC online.

As it's paid for out of my hard earned wages, it seems appropriate that I tear their web design team apart with savage opinions on their visually abusive website programming and crazy ideas, like I would towards whoever felt this was an ingenious choice of design inspiration. However, I am very aware that I do not live in an ideal world, seeing as I have to not only pay for the BBC, but live in a world where that money is spent on Eastenders. Eastenders I tell thee!

But allow me to check myself before I break myself (word up). As much as I'd love to whinge about the webpage, it's difficult to really find any major complaints. Obviously when evaluating a popular web page like this it's important to remember the purpose of the site. Being a news resource it's vital that the information is clear, in that a reader can look at the page and be informed of all the latest stories, concise, in that the story summaries the news in a short sentence and collated, in that the stories must be organised in a logical manner, and kept up to date.

The BBC News front page as it appears in Mozilla Firefox.

The BBC news main page manages to achieve these three key aims, presenting the information in a variety of ways. First of all we have a scrolling news ticker, providing links to the latest breaking news stories. The headlines provide the really important information, and the links take you to a full story.

Below this, the page focuses on three main headline stories, with the main story being accompanied by a larger thumbnail than the others to help those users with a short attention span (being the internet that would be the majority) to find the story visually appealing. Older, less important stories are given their place further across the page with plain text links in order to keep...order.

The page is kept in shape by a simple border of links on the right hand side that provide navigation to particular areas of newsical interest and the top is presented with a neat BBC border. Not only is this efficient, it is a theme that runs throughout the majoirty of the BBC website, so the consistency reminds users of where they are, and breeds familiarity. It has a rather homely effect, creating a website where users feel secure and confident that what is presented on the page (depending on how they feel about the BBC and its news reporting ability).

So overall, the web designers at the BBC have crafted a webpage that, for what it lacks in visual flair, it makes up for in relevance and effciency, which is a lot more than you could say for the majority of these fancy looking, flash based mistakes.

Blogging for Journalism?

Blogging. It's a funny old thing. Well, it's not really old and to be fair most aren't particularly funny. But one thing we can certainly be sure of is that it is a thing. A thing that exists for a purpose, whether we like it or not. A thing that was created out of a necessity for normal people to voice their loud, obnoxious opinions and tell the world what's happening in the world.

In the past few years Blogs have become a source of competition to the traditional journalism universe, especially print media who are slowly learning to embrace this idea of 'opinion' from a 'normal person' via that thing called the 'interweb', or something along those lines. I've never particularly considered the function of Blogging to be a substitute for journalism. The majority of them seem to focus on people's own little worlds, which is fair enough I suppose (people seem to find themselves more interesting than anyone else ever would) and a few blogs that I have come across are entirely opinion based, a sort of free for all editorial where anything goes and everything can be a target. An example? Maddox a foul mouthed, opinionated bastard who's soul aim within his blog is to rile the masses by, pretty much, telling his version of the truth.

Maddox: Self confessed owner of the Best Page in the Universe

But back to the issue at hand, is all this blogging nonsense journalism? The describer of words, the Dictionary, says that journalism is:

"1.the occupation of reporting, writing, editing, photographing, or broadcasting news or of conducting any news organization as a business."

First things first, the Dictionary considers journalism an occupation. Blogging isn't particularly considered a job. Bloggers have the opportunity to earn a bit of bread money via services such as Google's AdSense, but it's a bit difficult to really say that this is a bona fide career choice. Chances are, even if you pull in millions of readers that have an attention span longer than ten seconds, you'd only really be earning a slight bit more than a Gap worker in India. So no, blogging is not a career, at least not right now anyway.

As the definition kindly tells us, news is a key part of traditional journalism. Funny that. There are blogs that cover developments in many different fields, such as Collision Detection, a blog devoted to the world of technology and nerds and H5N1, one that focuses just on the pressing issue of Avian Flu, a subject that the likes of the BBC and Sky have completely forgotten about, until the next epidemic. These examples, and I'm sure a lot more, are clear indicators of blogging as journalism. They report news stories, often of a particular area of interest, and therefore of course count as journalism.

I think (and that's the key point) the biggest thing to consider with blogging is the independence it offers. Some people will be keen to share the latest news on 50's comic book horror whilst others will just use the technology to let people know how they felt about something. Essentially, be it journalism or not, the biggest victory blogging has over more traditional mediums such as newspapers is its ability to inform us of millions of opinions. Not all of them matter, and not all of them are right or fair, but to be able to have the chance to speak our minds, instead of being spoken for, is a massive jump in freedom and opportunity. Use it wisely.

Polls and Jedis.

According to a very recent BBC poll (which should instantly put doubt into your mind. Who knows how much we should trust it now?) most people are quite happy to accept massive changes in their lives to combat that most ominous of threats: "CLIMATE CHANGE." When I say most, I am of course referring to the majority of people the poll actually asked, which was only around twenty-two thousand (22,000). As much as I hate to sound cynical and a bit like Jeremy Clarkson, many resources tell me that the estimated world population as it stands at the moment is 6,687,639,322. And counting. That's a number so big that typing it fully would consume a whole sentence, therefore I decided to just use numbers.

You'll notice I was quite happy to type twenty-two thousand out fully, and behold! I did it again, which just goes to emphasize how insignificantly small this so called 'majority' of the world is. I've never been a massive fan of these 'polls'. When you consider that one of the most important polls, the Census, had three hundred and ninety thousand (yet another tiny statistic that I'll write in words) people classify their religion as 'Jedi', you've got to appreciate it when I admit to getting a little voice in my head that suggests that quite a few people don't take these 'polls' seriously and that, essentially, the 'findings' are just sheer bullshit.

The Jedi: Religion or, no wait - LIES!

Maybe I'm just speaking for myself (that would make sense, after all this is my blog and therefore it should be what I think) but I genuinely do not believe all these people really took the whole thing seriously. I'm not saying that 'GLOBAL WARMING isn't a problem, or that we're just avoiding the metaphorical elephant curling one out in the middle of the room. What I am saying is that these kind of polls have a tendency of giving us, the people reading the results, and the people 'finding' the results, a rather...unbalanced view on how we as a global community can react to events and problems which will affect us all.

I'm sure there are some people who will be willing to make dramatic changes to their lifestyles in the face of 'GLOBAL WARMING', but I certainly do not believe that the majority of the world, hell even the Western world, could even begin to consider just how much would be asked of them to change. And that's just the people, nevermind the good old faceless and greedy mega corporations, squeezing the world and the man of every last penny.

On the subject of 'GLOBAL WARMING', I'd invite you to watch this video on a possible solution. Even if you don't care for the subject, it's still vaguely entertaining as the bloke has a very bizarre looking face.