Chris Riley wrote, reordered slightly:
In particular I think its useful for highlighting issues the public care
more about. For instance a couple of says ago whilst Pakistan was the
headline, most of us were reading the climate change story.
Are you sure Pakistan was the headline? The "climate change story" became a
subheading just after midnight on the 29th, became the main headline around
07:50am, and stayed there, as far as I can tell, right through the 29th and
30th October, until 04:05 on the 31st October when the main headline became
the Prince Charles/Pakistan story for around 15 minutes (data from my front
page archive: http://www.bbc.co.uk/homearchive/ and my news archive).
On the web page you'll see subjects they want us to read about vs. what
we're actually reading about for the past 24 hours, and past 2 weeks.
"they want us to read"? That's not the point of the editorial (by which I
mean the ordering of stories on the front page) at all, in my view. I have
BBC news in my RSS reader, so that gives me the latest news. I click on the
ones I want to read, but that shouldn't affect in any way which ones the BBC
decide are important. They hopefully weight stories by more than popularity,
otherwise all the stories would be about celebrities and kittens? :-)
What your site measures (presuming the popular feed goes on page views,
which seems likely) is which stories have been clicked on, not read. I
frequently click a headline if it sounds interesting, read the first
paragraph, decide it isn't or I already know the story, and close the page.
If lots of people are like that, then that makes that story a popular story
even though it isn't at all. So what you're actually measuring is how good
BBC headlines are at getting people to click through.
Similarly, if a BBC post gets linked to from Slashdot or Boing Boing, it
will almost certainly become a most popular link. But that doesn't mean it
is most popular in terms of the "what we're actually reading about", just
that lots of people read those sites and click links, realise the first
paragraph tells them all they need to know, and that's it.
Most emailed would perhaps be a better XML feed to use than Most popular, as
then at least people have gone out of their way to send the story to someone
else. But that doesn't change my first point - the story that is most
emailed will be the one about a man marrying a goat or somesuch, which I
wouldn't think should be a "top story" anywhere, no more than the "also in
the news" bit of the front page for humour value.
Lastly, surely the headline stories on the front page are, quite possibly,
new news. The stories that are most popular are going to be those that have
been most widely distributed, by email, IM, RSS, whatever, and so will
almost certainly be a few hours behind. So I wouldn't expect the headlines
to match the most popular?
I don't have any desire to highlight any hidden agendas the BBC's
editorial staff might have (although I guess it can), but more from an
interest in how "in touch" are the BBC with what the public actually
reads and cares about compared to what they think we do.
Why would the BBC want to be "in touch" with spammers? I say this because of
the story some months back of the BBC's "MSN charging" story from 2001
suddenly becoming very popular - "On Sunday it was the most-read business
story" - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4778046.stm - a complete
irrelevancy from the headlines point of view. :)
--
ATB,
Matthew | http://www.dracos.co.uk/
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