For an organisation that once insisted that radio news readers had to wear dinner jackets whilst delivering a bulletin, the BBC now seems to be making very brave advances into the world of web 2.0. Of course, the BBC website has been a global market leader for a number of years. However, I've always had the sense that it tended to rely on quantity of information, rather than any particularly flash web aps to achieve this (as well as piggy backing on the BBC's already well-established news and information gathering networks).

Now though, new innovations seem to really be harnessing the capabilities of the web to distribute this information in different ways. I first noticed this a couple of weeks back when I discovered that BBC Politics had set up a twitter feed, and have been regularly updating it with short banner headlines (which also link to the main story via tiny urls). It's obvious what this service has been set up to do - give people access to mobile news whilst they are on the go via RSS. And for that it is a brilliant service.

Today, I logged onto the BBC website, and they were touting the beta version of their new website. It allows you to drag and drop different content boxes, so as select which aspects of the news your want to focus (my page will now, for example, always prioritise cricket, technology and politics headlines over others items), and receive updates from BBC journalists who blog. For anyone who uses bloglines or even Google homepage, the features on it won't be very new. But it always seemed that lots of the web 2.0 stuff we speak about a lot (RSS maybe being the classic example) has never really penetrated into the consciousness of the mass of the population. However, with a major organisation like the BBC pushing these capabilities, it can really start to make a difference to the way media is consumed.