Nicholas, the chap in charge of the technical side of our MT4 upgrade, emailed this story about the BBC's blog upgrade this morning. They've beaten us to Movable Type 4, probably helped by the cunning use of those good folks at Headshift.It's nice to see that another big blog platform has been successfully upgraded, though, and I did find their stats interesting. Jem Stone gives their numbers at about 12,000 blog posts - about half of what we've published - and 1 million comments, which is many, many times what we've achieved. That suggests that the Beeb blogs are getting better engagement than us, which wasn't a huge surprise to me. We still have a lot of work to do on creating the sort of blogs people want to engage with, not just read. That said, as a colleague pointed out, the BBC's audience is probably many, many times ours, so in terms of ratio of comments to visitors, we may not actually be doing that badly.
Anyway, congratulations to the folks behind the BBC blogs. And, um, if you hit any major problems, could you warn us in the next week or so?
April 18, 2008 10:16 PM | Reply
I should know this stuff inside out but 12,000 is the number of blog posts in the last 12 months *not* since we first started doing this properly which was Jan 06 so
actually our post to comment ratio is, despite the fact that we are the BBC, still low (ish) . I should have made that clearer in my post which i wrote still befuddled from the work the night before.
And yep. Headshift have been a great help with us on this project although its worth noting that we went with an in house commenting solution rather than those supplied by MT.
Good luck with your upgrade. Glad we're now debugging and planning phase two.