Some thoughts from the British gorilla - or, is this blog post is too long?

They keynote speaker this morning was Adrian Van Klaveren, deputy director and controller of production, BBC News, which has been online since 1997.
Get this, the "Beeb" has the "idiosyncratic funding" of an annual fee of $250 on every TV set in the UK. (I thought it was just $75. Man, that must be nice.) BBC allso gets money from commercial licenses for content and from a grant-in-aid from the British Foreign Office for covering news overseas.
BBC considers itself the global leader in 24/7 and on-demand news (What they want, when they want it) and current affairs.
He said there is no sense of starting or finishing a day, it is truly round-the-clock operation.
But social networking is now taking away attention from news. We must ask ourselves, what will the next big idea be? What's the next big attention grabber?
Keeps in mind relevance. That is, do we really understand what we want to do?
Big media players do not have a track record of innovation. (ya think?)
Again raised questions: What are you about? What are you trying to achieve? What resources can be made available for the task? What are others doing? How can you distinguish yourself from them?
Quality of serendipity, we have to deliver content in an unexpected way. Need to create a hugely enhanced consumer experience.
"MySpace is increasing the time young people spend online."
"User-generated content is crucial in sharing the monopoly on truth."
But must use technology as an enabler, not just for tech's sake.
I love this quote, puts things in perspective: "When TV came along radio became audio wallpaper and movies, which had been the ubiquitous movie, became a special event."
Yesterday the mission was all about editorial (journalism); today it's about packaging.
Web is not TV. Mobile is not web or TV. New biz is passé; we're in the information biz
Are we in this for public service or to provide an audience for advertisers? (I would say we have to do the latter so we can perform the former.)
He showed an interesting video -- Ron asked for a copy for us -- called Creative Future, which grew out of the effort to strategically map out BBC's next steps. It must be modern, accessible, courageous and dynamic.
He offered some numbers documenting the huge increase in user content submissions since the London Train bombings (7/7). It increased to the point that after a recent industrial explosion (at Buncefield) they had 6,500 emails and 1,500 images offered from readers, with lines outside their satellite transmission trucks of people wanting to contribute their material.
In answer to a question, he said BBC even has a user-generated content hub (that's really what it's called) of 6 people to vet and verify the stuff they get from users.
BBC breaks it's audience down as:
- Traditional: Sits on couch to watch the news at a scheduled hour
- Mix & matchers: consume a combo of linear news and news on demand
- Clickers and flickers: All info they consume is on demand, don't even try to reach them with a scheduled broadcast, but rather offer them interactive models that allow them to define and schedule the content
A neat thing: BBC's done Web cam interviews, interviewing reader-contributors over their own computer web cams.
His conclusons: Life is complex. Our job is to simplify it and make it relevant to all audiences. It is OK to fail, but it can't be a mindless failure, you have to learn from it.