The BBC has been marking 10 years of bbc.co.uk with a series of posts on the BBC Internet blog. They offer an insight into the creation of what has become a new arm of the corporation, and the third most visited site in Britain, behind only Google and MSN, with 17m regular users in the UK, and many more globally.
Usually we tend to hear only from the bosses about this, and Ashley Highfield has a lengthy post on 10 years of online.
But we also get to hear from Brandon Butterworth, now Principal Technologist in the BBC’s research and development team and the man who first registered the bbc.co.uk domain. I remember first encountering him as one of the team behind Election 97, one of the first BBC News websites.
Brandon’s post gives a sense of the Wild West flavour of those early days in 1997, when no one quite understand the potential of the web. The popularity of the election site caught just about everyone by surprise. And as Brandon recalls, the death of Diana, and the creation of a tribute mini-site, proved a turning point:
By a week later – September 10th – the response to the Diana coverage had convinced everyone that the Internet would be big and that the BBC would be there – properly. With an October deadline, there was no point continuing with meetings. A committee wasn’t going to make it. A ninja squad was needed.
I got a small bucket of cash and got told to do whatever was needed.
That last line really sums up the environment of those early years. There was something of the enterpreneurial spirit of a start-up, and it worked.
Brandon’s full post is worth reading, if only to gain a different perspective of the development of the BBC online.
Filed under: BBC, internet , Ashley Highfield, bbc.co.uk, Brandon Butterworth
