This all started yesterday, but I'm here to pour some cold water on the BBC's plans - the "radical plans to rebuild its website around user-generated content, including blogs and home videos, with the aim of creating a public service version of MySpace.com". 
There have been some good reactions, and speculation about software.
But, like Om, I have to say, I'm cynical about this whole thing.
What the BBC don't seem to understand is that user-generated content is happening all around them, and that we don't need "BBC Blogs" or "BBC Flickr" or "BBC YouTube" for that to happen.
The BBC have been incredibly patronising with the Creative Archive - instead of releasing the stuff and letting people have fun with it, they've been having little "test runs" where they set up the parameters of the project, release about 3 or 4 minutes of footage and then invite mashups.
But mashups and remixes dont happen with such predictability. They happen when people have lots of content to play with, no boundaries to stick to, and the ability to follow their imagination.
Creativity is going to happen without project briefs and trial runs from the BBC. As I've discussed, the BBC are reluctant podcasters - they 'admit' to podcasting when they are talking about the inability of undergraduates to read and write properly, rather than shouting from the hilltops the phrase "We podcast... we're still relevant!" They then go on to describe it as a "non-literary culture". (An army of twenty-somethings walking around listening to Radio 4, PBS and Cory Doctorow short stories is a non-literary culture?)
This is all fluff. If the BBC wanted to do user-generated content, it's quite simple how they could do it. They should add a new widget to their news pages which pulls in results from Technorati or some other blog search engine. That way people could respond to BBC News articles.
The problem with that is that the sort of people who will respond on their own blogs are usually pretty intelligent and will point out problems. The sort of people who hang out in the Have Your Say box (or the Guardian's new Comment is Free sections) don't usually say anything unique, repeating tired and hackneyed "opinions" rather than synthesising interesting stuff out of the river of historical context.
We don't need another blogging site - we've got Blogger, Typepad, Moveable Type, Wordpress, and a million other services each offering their own version. What we need is simply for the BBC to quietly add this functionality.
The BBC iPlayer is a sad impersonator of what should be happening - which is free and clear MPEG4 downloads. Why would someone want to download something via the iPlayer and deal with all the Windows Media Player proprietary crap that goes with it when BitTorrent lets you get the same content in a true time and place shift (DivX, Xvid and MPEG4 play in a lot more places than DRM-ed Windows Media files).
Linux and Mac using licence payers are subsidising the added value for the Windows Media platform, just as people who don't use RealPlayer are subsidising the BBC's adding of value to that terrible platform.
Trusting this nation's enormous and varying public media output to Microsoft's Windows Media platform and it's atrocious DRM solution is akin to letting NAMBLA look after your kids.
Why the seven day limit? Do programmes stop being interesting after a week? Of course not. Uninteresting programmes stop being interesting after a week, but most don't start being interesting at all.
That's not what I care about. When I look back in ten years, it's not going to be the Eastenders reruns I care about, or those depressing interviews on Radio 4 with public intellectuals. It's going to be the few things they got right and don't release.
Jonathan Miller's "Atheism" programmes was one of those instances. It was only available for a long time on digital TV, until they finally rebroadcast it on terrestrial. Thankfully, someone made a torrented version of the show, and I have mine safely backed up to a DVD in an open format.
This doesn't free us from the tyranny of schedulers. I don't want to watch programmes when the BBC say I should. I like listening to 'In Our Time', but there's no way in hell I'm going to be near a radio from 9.00-9.30 on a Thursday morning. I'm either on the train or I'm asleep (or sometimes both). If I download the podcast, I can let them queue up and listen to them when I'm interested. And if I stop half way through, when I come back, it all goes from where I left off.
I then backup all the listened-to shows on to a DVD every week or so creating the "Creative Archive" where the BBC are incapable of doing so. Radio programmes and television become items which can be stored and referred to rather than disposables. We wouldn't have a system with books where you can download them for only seven days and then have to throw them away, so why with any other form of culture?
To whoever was responsible for this at the BBC: you've done this in a completely farcical manner. It's taken years for you to get your finger out and do anything, and every time it happens, it's thoroughly disappointing.
You don't need to make BBC Flickr because Flickr do it perfectly well. You don't need to make BBC MySpace because MySpace do that as perfectly as that can be done. We don't want a BBC blogging service, we want you to look outside your own hide-bound institution and see what the rest of the world has been doing for the last eight or nine years.
