Chris Garrett — Cotswolds based web designer

So I’m back in the office now, having spent a great week talking pure innovation with the Beeb. The outcome of the week was pretty good, the idea we pitched is something the BBC wants to move forward with, we just need to meet with their tech team to investigate the feasibility of it.

What did we pitch to the BBC? Well, it started off as “isMyCity”, a localised social networking platform. However, after talking with the mentors and commissioners, the idea was heading in a much more specific direction and we decided to rename the project “My News”.

My News is a proposed extension to the BBC’s existing Where I Live website which allows users to create a personalised news stream. When arriving at the site, the user can register traditionally or use single sign-on services such as OpenID or Facebook to reduce the barrier to entry. The site then uses a number of analytical devices to build attention data around the user, from explicit voting icons to timing the amount of time a user spends on an article (an effective gauge of the depth interest) and builds the users personalised news feed based on this.

We also touched on a few “viral” hooks, such as broadcasting user interaction to their facebook feed via Beacon and allowing cross platform consumption. The only concern the commissioners seemed to have was one of scalability, will the system be able to handle the BBCs mass of users?

You can check out the visuals for the presentation below: (please be aware this was done quite late at night after a few Mojitos, so may look a bit rough)