With flickr like tagging of content ("folksonomy") all the rage at the moment, I’m surprised we haven’t seen this before but I think the project the BBC launched yesterday, and which I’m working on, is the first message board to utilise topic tagging as a navigational feature.
The message board, shared by 40+ BBC regional websites, can be approached from two directions. From the England portal, users enter the top level of the message board and can see a list of popular discussion tags across all the regions. They can also search using tags.
Users coming from one of the regional sites get a regional specific page (as shown) which displays the tags for discussions in that region only as well as a list of all discussions (in reverse chronological order) and there’s a region specific search functionality as well. Launched in beta, there is much more to come that I can’t tell you about here.
By the way, I just found out that people can now do stuff with feeds from other (not the one above) BBC community sites – see BBC Backstage
Please note that this post, as well as other content posted on this blog, are my personal views. This blog is in no way endorsed by my employer.
It looks very cool. Things have really moved on since I left. You must be very happy.
I see that the Kent romany topic has come across in full swing and that local football is also taking off.