When I took over the online History commissioning job, I knew that we would need a mix of traditional, trusted BBC content with some attention-grabbing digital stuff to get people to it.

It's easier said than done. Many technologists and designers are not really interested in history. Like much of the audience they were turned off by dull lessons at school. Our challenge was to make it relevant to audiences.

This is a common desire. Commissioning editors often want stuff 'made relevant' - TV producers might translate this as putting a celebrity in it - one we can relate to (Who Do You Think You Are does this very well). How does digital media make something relevant?

Following a development session with BERG about a year ago, we were most excited about this particular project.

It used the central premise of digital media - that of connection. Connecting by juxtaposing two datasets:

Historical plans, events and routes
with
Where you are.

The prototype as launched is an application made by BERG with plans drawn by Keltie Cochrane.

It sits by itself at the moment but we are discussing using on BBC History and maybe News pages (even off the BBC?) when we can make sharable modules in version 2.

The BERG blog discusses the tech and design reasoning more.

What I would like is feedback on this prototype:

• What do you want to see?
• What doesn't work?
• How can we make it better?

We think this is a decent first attempt but it is one so rich with possibility that we want your voice in the room when we take it to the next step.

Max Gadney is Commissioning Executive, Multi-Platform Team, BBC.

I mentioned that different BBC departments will need to collaborate in the the grey area between the need for a Voice and the wealth of Choice - when it comes to defining how people will consume video in the future.

FM&T's blogger in residence Steve Bowbrick has interviewed Matt McDonnell about search here and their discussion is obviously technology led - so in what follows I'm trying to open up the debate to include all parts of the business.

There could be a tendency for traditional television executives to depend on the Voice - e.g. established TV Channels and Programme brands.

On the flipside, the technologists could believe that this will all be solved by the algorithms and interfaces of on-demand technology - The Choice.

The answer is somewhere in between, so lets have a look at what the qualities are of 'Choice and Voice':

Photo by aemkei on Flickr.

Voice

Voices include the BBC Television Channels of BBC One, Two, Three and Four. They have traditionally helped people to decide what to watch. They are brands - they are a promise, frequently fulfilled, of what you will get.

For a brand to succeed you must get something you want and expect from them. Established Voice brands are having to compete in a fragmented market- where people are only loyal to the brands that frequently satisfy them.

Choice

Our most obvious Choice product is the very successful BBC iPlayer, allowing people to catch up at their convenience. In addition to this, the BBCis developing recommendations systems - allowing you get options more relevant to your interests anywhere on the BBC online. Choice is about relevance of content and convenience of the distribution. The danger is when these suggestions become the only means of consumption - and people require other suggestions outside the areas that are already known to or selected by them.

The area between Choice and Voice

If TV executives and technologists can appreciate the strengths of what each can offer - the (still) dominance of linear television brands and the emerging sophistication of on-demand technologies will compliment each other.

What will these new forms of suggestion be? What are the new Choices? What are the new Voices? Who and what will people trust to filter their options? How will our models of trust change?

Are Choice & Voice the right areas for us to be considering or do you think that we missing something here? Should we tear it all down and start again? What do you do and what would you like to see us do? Any thoughts welcome.

Max Gadney is Channel Editor, Multiplatform, BBC Vision.

SND is the Society of News Design. It is firmly based in media but with presentations including subjects such as airport design and wayfinding. It is one of the broadest design conferences around and largely bereft of people whose style outweighs their substance.

This has been an interest of mine since I was young and I was fortunate to work with designers who went to the conference when I led the News Online design team before I moved to TV commissioning.

What has this to do with anything?

Well, the BBC Two White season website includes Spectrum: a visualisation of comments from BBC News's Have Your Say (it's on the right hand side of the page).

We commissioned this in order to allow people to explore this complex debate more freely than they might in the conventional text format. As one of the BBC's most popular television services, BBC Two must make subjects like this accessible. But being BBC Two it must do it in a way that encourages discovery and serendipity.

As well as the TV programmes, we decided that the White Season would also be a good place to highlight some material from the archive and quality contributions in Video Nation.

Then the question of what we could do with comments came up.

At first, we were cautious.

Some argue against the BBC doing this, with accusations of censorship. But the reality is that if we premoderate, the public won't miss out on spicy, talk-show, "robust" banter, but will be spared a morass of banal and offensive material.

Having decided that the main debate will be housed in Have Your Say for its editorial robustness, we then attempted to visualise what was happening. Much of the work started at database level. We interrogated past debates on this and similar subjects to assemble hundreds of featured adjectives.

With this list, we cross-referenced comments in HYS to label and segment those coming into the White Season debate. It was then an information and graphic design job to create an interface and functions that worked.

Information Visualisation is an aspect of digital media that is reaching out to mass audiences. The Facebook friend wheel is one well known example. We wanted the users to have more involvement, which is why we have enabled agreement/ disagreement on the user interface. The application display becomes richer the more people use it, as well as giving an overview of the main emotional themes.

One of the purposes was to enable more exploration of the data than normal. We seem to be averaging 30 clicks per user at the moment, so that is pretty good. We also wanted to provide different ways of seeing these data - the "Emotional Detail" is my favourite but there is also something very satisfying about the "Regional" view. We have been iterating this through the week in response to where people are clicking or not, as that kind of responsiveness is important in a temporal experience like this.

We are not the first to do this. BBC News has done some really nice work. The Election graphics and swingometer were a great success with audiences.

First of all, we're trying to get the experience right, balancing the compexity of functionality and data with ease of use. Secondly, we're looking for where this treatment is useful editorially. And like everything that we do, the post project review should help us decide where else we use this type of experience - as should your thoughts and comments on this post.

Max Gadney is Channel Editor, BBC Two & BBC Four, Multi-Platform, BBC Vision