BBC creates transfer gossip widget – of other people’s football news
The BBC are trialling a new widget of gossip leading up to the transfer deadline. “The system uses web search technology to identify content from other sports news websites that is similar to the content on the BBC Football Gossip Page.”
The move not only demonstrates a commitment by the BBC to ’sharing the love’ in linking more to external sides (something the BBC Trust asked them to do back in June), but also cleverly distributes their own brand – and content (the top link on the widget? ‘Latest BBC football gossip’) by including buttons for you to embed the widget on your Facebook, hi5 or Orkut page, Wordpress or Blogger blog, or Google homepage.
I’m not able to tell, however, whether the ‘Google juice’ denied in similar experiments is still denied by this. As it’s a widget, and therefore ‘pulled’ from elsewhere, I’m guessing not. But I’m sure those news sites won’t complain about the traffic they receive.
Indeed, it demonstrates once again that linking to other sites is generally a far more savvy move than not linking at all.
4 Comments, Comment or Ping
malcolm coles
Oh please no. I spent much of yesterday refreshing google news to see if arsenal had signed arshavin, and being amazed at the completely made-up nonsense. Let’s not find more ways of spreading this rubbish.
My favourite stories were the (wrong) ones about him being at the airport about to fly home. Perhaps he thought Britain worked as well as Russia when it snowed …
Feb 3rd, 2009
Richard Kendall
Am using the weather forecast widget from the BBC beta weather site on our work site: http://www.peterboroughtoday.co.uk/localtravel, the weather widget is clearly branded, but only one small text link displays at the bottom.
Am also using the football widget, but am less sure about it’s content quality as Malcolm has mentioned above.
But it does confirm the Beeb’s commitment to sharing content, looking forward to more examples.
Feb 4th, 2009
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