Socialising news

Kevin Rose was in town for last week’s FOWA event. He was at the BBC the other day too, although he singularly failed to excite an otherwise eager audience of editors and technologists from around the Corporation. Anyway, his presentation at FOWA was a bit more interesting. His principle message was that Digg’s mission is not to add more features but to ‘be more important’ by—among other things—jumping from the web to other media/platforms.

Some people at the BBC have picked up on this idea. There are dozens of people around BBC Future Media & Technology—but also in the media-specific divisions of the Corporation—working on (or imagining) ways of ‘socialising’ TV, of grafting social media functions onto linear/broadcast output.

So several people here at the BBC were very interested to hear Rose’s words on the topic. My contribution is the Photoshop job above. I’ll leave it at that. I’m not theorising the actual functionality of a Digg button for your remote. In fact, Digg would probably be entirely the wrong kind of tool for the job: it should probably be a combination of a notifier like Twitter (“Hey, I’m watching Strictly Come Dancing!”) and a bookmarker like del.icio.us (“Hey, this is a great show and it’s about the cha-cha, celebrity and Bruce Forsyth”)…