The site's mission statement is "the place for the finest British comedy from the past, present and future". There are collection pages and playlists from comedians like Stephen Merchant and Johnny Vegas aggregating the comedy archive for the first time.

Through the Red Button on television and the ever improving automatically generated programme support pages (to be found at /programmes) on the web, we are offering audiences more from the shows that they love like The Thick Of It and Outnumbered. For the next generation of on- and off-screen talent bbc.co.uk/comedy is a low risk playground where we are developing TV and radio hits of the future.

The web is changing comedy. You only need to look at what's happening in America to see that. Comedy destination websites like Funny or Die, College Humor and The Onion have large global audiences and they have all now partnered with TV networks in order to spin their web series into TV shows. Having spent most of the last year in beta, we're beginning to see talent and ideas originated online migrating in a similar way. Big Babies which you can see on CBBC and iPlayer at the moment was developed from a series of sketches Broken Biscuits and BBC Comedy Exec Jack Cheshire made for the website last year. Jason Lewis is another new talent whose TV prospects we are really excited about. The first of his sketches are now online, with more to come in the next few weeks.

Leave a comment and let us know what you think.

Will Saunders is Executive Producer, Online, BBC Comedy.

That blog made up the last part of bbc.co.uk/rednoseday jigsaw which we found out over the weekend won the Prix Italia Award for Best Special Event Website. I hadn't had a look at the Red Nose Day site for a while and at the time we were all working on it we were also trying to launch Comedy Extra so I think there's some public recognition long overdue.

Red Nose day is one of those special occasions when you feel lucky to work at the BBC. The whole corporation comes together with Comic Relief - and ultimately the British public - to do something extraordinary. The combined BBC Red Nose Day and rednoseday.com websites were a great expression of that collaboration. Credit goes to the teams that built and populated the sites, those that climbed Kilimanjaro and sent video off that mountain day and night, to the talent, and the TV and radio shows who really saw the added value that the web could offer this year's Red Nose Day.

This was my first Comic Relief working on the interactive side, and the best example I can cite of how different it all felt from working in TV or radio was when, on the night, Comic Relief asked celebs to do live donation appeals via Facebook. It went in as raw video, and a few seconds later hundreds and hundreds of comments pinged back. That was a bit of an eye opener...

Will Saunders is executive producer, BBC Comedy.

From the outset our Commissioner Martin Trickey and I knew the potential for this was just huge. The BBC is after all the biggest comedy production house in the world, we generate hundreds and hundreds of hours of comedy on TV and radio every year. Then there's the fact Comedy is a cut through genre online, just look at BBC3 comedy punching above its weight on iPlayer, R4's Friday Night Comedy podcast delivering around a million stream requests a month, or BBC YouTube with Robert Webb's Flashdance having done over half a million views. So we've set out to leverage the BBC comedy portfolio online and also create a new playground for the next generation of comedy talent.

Already on the site you can find Stewart Lee and Armando Ianucci alongside new sketch acts like Broken Biscuits, Tommy and the Weeks and bedroom pioneer David Firth. And over the next few weeks there's loads more exciting stuff around the new Reece Shearsmith & Steve Pemberton comedy Psychoville, a web only version of HIGNFY, animated Just a Minute, exclusive work from masters of the web like Robert Popper and Ben Wheatley.

And then when we get a community around it we can start to play UGC games like the great stuff you find on B3TA or that Adam & Joe do so well on 6Music. Then with better functionality and leveraging the best brains from FM&T we can personalise, widgetise and globalise our comedy too. What you can see now is really just the end of the beginning.

Now about that budget...

Will Saunders is executive producer, BBC Comedy.