Spalpeen

The BBC have made what is, in my opinion, the best site design change for the past decade of BBC News online. The first place I go when I check news.bbc.co.uk is the “Most Read” tab. They’ve now added an extra five spaces. That, to me, is like doubling my supply of crack. I’m going to click twice as much, and read twice as much, and share twice as much.

Why do I love this little link box so much? Well, if you read the site often, you’ll know that occasionally there will be a big piece of upcoming news that you suspect is going to be “front page news”, but which the BBC News editors haven’t, for whatever reason (laziness? because they want to put populist stories up front?) posted as a major story on the homepage. A major example of this was the story of Geert Wilders, which appeared as a minor story for an hour or so until it picked up steam and he tried to get into the UK (incidentally, I first heard of the story from @BreakingNewsOn, which is usually has news 5-10 minutes before every major news site and even Google, and has its own set of annoyances).

So, if I go down to the BBC News Most Read box, I can see what the readers are sharing (it’s based on traffic). People know best what the news is, so it’s actually far more valuable for me as a news finder than the human-edited homepage is ever going to be. I’ve seen endless stories about the 17,000 extra U.S. troops in Afghanistan, so there’s absolutely no reason for me to click the headline story. I know it’ll be the same old BBC News/AP style, with about two facts which I’ve already seen repeated dozens of times before.

This minor, almost insignificant change beats every one of the BBC’s stupid site refreshes that they do every few years. More please! And do please tell me if I’m crazy.