Spalpeen

Jesus, can the BBC get more cringeworthy? Some dude that has been working on the internet for the past 13 years is leaving, and the BBC has posted a nice little cute parting post for the guy. I would probably summarise the post like this:

“Oh my, how the internet has changed! It’s got all mature and stuff! Don’t you know: the internet is cool because it lets you display text and stuff all over the world? GLOBAL FUCKING AUDIENCE! It’s not a fad anymore y’know — BRITPOP! The early 90s! — We actually use the internet for real, important crap today. It’s like, all reminiscent and stuff. People used to think, like, the internet was for geeks n’shit. Broadcasters actually use computers. Woah. Web two point oh.”

Get with it Beeb. The potential for the internet is so frakin’ huge that I don’t want to see any sort of post like this for at least a couple of decades. A huge proportion of this country has grown up with the internet and doesn’t know what life is like without it. Get that through your publicly funded head! Stop freaking navel gazing and get into THE NOW.

There isn’t a day that goes by without the BBC hitting a “blogosphere” story that was yesterday’s news. Dump the whole process for writing news; stop asking image owners for permission to use images and lobby the Government for a US style “fair use” policy in the UK. Tell your bloggers to stop referring to the journalistic process in their blogs (we get it, you’re better than us). One of the best examples I saw was a BBC blogger writing in his first blog post — at DAVOS — was that the current post was his first blog post ever. Can you get more cliched than that? Take those crappy “headshot” images off of each of your blog posts. I mean, the BBC blogs don’t even have a “next page”: once you’ve reached the last blog post on that page, that’s it. How come only a single section of BBC.com/news has a regular link to what normal people are discussing on the internet?

There are so many bloody problems with the BBC “online”. There’s a reason why a bunch of people with little to no journalism experience are kicking their arses. There’s a reason why the BBC has to ask the public whether or not they should give all taxpayers access to BBC content online. They don’t have time to reminisce.