Some insights into the workings of the BBC, UGC and online video from Shane Richmond’s latest post:

“At a time when most newspapers, including this one, are trying to encourage user participation and comments on their sites, the BBC is questioning the need to host those conversations.

“Instead they’re linking their content out to the likes of YouTube, Flickr, Technorati and del.icio.us. Encourage the conversation but let it happen elsewhere.

“The burden of moderation is simply too great. Like us, the BBC moderates comments received from readers, mostly for legal reasons, but as Tom pointed out: “What we call moderation, readers call censorship.”

“The more successful you are at attracting reader responses, he explained, the bigger the problem gets.”

Also:

“One week in November last year, the BBC news site published around 500 pieces of video.

“Analysing the traffic for those clips later, they found that just 30 of them accounted for about half the traffic. They have learned some lessons about what type of video clips work online but mostly they learned to focus on doing less better.”