Many pages on bbc.co.uk allow comments, but they tend to be trivial (“Mylene’s dress was a bit short”), are heavily moderated (which costs a lot of time), and are tied into the BBC site. Many of the comments people make are actually direct contacts regarding participation in the programmes, which end up going to the production team rather than on the page.
Mark is experimenting with allowing/forcing people to post their comments to their own blogs, and linking them back (like how the real Web works ;-) ). As well as solving some of the issues mentioned above, this would help the BBC fulfil its remit of encouraging participation in the Web (as opposed to treating the BBC site as a walled garden.
Apparently the message sinks in when people are shown Technorati results for their pages, when they realise how many people are commenting on them without them being aware of it.
In the Q&A afterwards, someone mentioned disemvowellment, which is an interesting technique I haven’t heard of before.
[tags]barcamplondon3, bbc, comments[/tags]