UK: BBC experiments with external links
Posted by Katherine Thompson on August 18, 2008 at 8:23 AM
BBC News is experimenting with external links within the main body of its text to provide users with more external information. The trial will last for four weeks and is only available on the UK website.
The 'in-page links' direct users to background information about the topic of the article from across the BBC News site and to other external sources, such as, YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, and external news organisations' sites.
External links are identified by symbols and open up a separate window previewing the linked-to page.
Steve Herrmann, BBC News website editor says of the trial: "We wanted to include these sources because they promote sharing of content, have a huge array of material of potential editorial relevance, are technically easy to work with and also we wanted to gauge your thoughts about us linking to these user-generated sources."
He went on to say, "We're not taking an exclusive approach to which sources we link to, the whole idea is to try out and develop a system that is flexible enough for pretty much anything."
The system has been developed in partnership with multimedia technology firm Apture, which implemented a similar feature for the WashingtonPost.com.
Source: Journalism.co.uk
The 'in-page links' direct users to background information about the topic of the article from across the BBC News site and to other external sources, such as, YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, and external news organisations' sites.
External links are identified by symbols and open up a separate window previewing the linked-to page.
Steve Herrmann, BBC News website editor says of the trial: "We wanted to include these sources because they promote sharing of content, have a huge array of material of potential editorial relevance, are technically easy to work with and also we wanted to gauge your thoughts about us linking to these user-generated sources."
He went on to say, "We're not taking an exclusive approach to which sources we link to, the whole idea is to try out and develop a system that is flexible enough for pretty much anything."
The system has been developed in partnership with multimedia technology firm Apture, which implemented a similar feature for the WashingtonPost.com.
Source: Journalism.co.uk
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