Personal Curated Consumption @ the BBC

In When push comes to pull. The new economy & culture of networking technology waaaaaaaay back in 2006... I used a phrase curated consumption

technology as we argue enables us to connect, work and collaborate in ways previously thought impossible. And the industrial mindset of rigid institutions and architectures of revenue created as choke points can no longer work, when we are busy creating our own, content, our own media ecologies, our own brands and business models.

We are in fact curating consumption as Prosumers and Pro-Ams. In the same way that there is no online and offline, real world and virtual world - there is only blended reality.

Then I argue that brands/businesses must comply to the following 3 things
1). Life Enabling
2). Life Simplifying
3). Navigational ie. Help be navigate my way better through my life

Businesses become facilitators or service providers where the role of a product or servie is conceived in a completely different context. In the Experience Economy - you have to, as Bill Bailey says, start with a laugh and work backwards.

So the BBC launching a new website built around curated consumption comes as no surprise. There are echoes here also of Howard Rheingold talking about Technologies of Cooperation and also of Civic Engagement

I know that web 2.0 describes a technological approach but the BBC's initiative is representative of the Age of Engagement. Where context and personal meaning derived through curated consumption, become critical factors in a world which has seen the end of information feudalism.

Hence the use of widgets.

Richard Titus the Acting Head of User Experience explains

From a conceptual point of view, the widgetization adopted by Facebook, iGoogle and netvibes weighed strongly on our initial thinking. We wanted to build the foundation and DNA of the new site in line with the ongoing trend and evolution of the Internet towards dynamically generated and syndicable content through technologies like RSS, atom and xml. This concept formed one of the most important underlying design and strategic elements of the new homepage. The approach has the added benefit of making content more accessible, usable, and more efficient to modify for consumption across a wider array of networks and devices.

This has been conceived as a network, not a rigid, inflexible infrastructure. Supported also by those that helped build it via blogs. This is the Wealth of Networks.

A Social Network

And of course the project will be forever in a cycle of continuous improvement. Because, today life is always in beta as we prepare for life in the post-modern age And Broadcasting embraces the digital age

Comments

[David Cushman]

I love your idea of curation - it's something I base some of my thinking around media playing the role of interface of a person's experience of culture (nuancing that experience by its curating abilities).
Re the Beeb - I think they've really missed a very large opportunity to leave their silo and grasp the networked world. As you know, I've posted about that here:
http://fasterfuture.blogspot.com/2007/12/bbc-beta-new-design-same-old-content.html