±«Óãtv

Starting a Conversation

• Robin Hamman
• 24 Aug 06, 02:16 PM

We've started to get emails and some comments on the blog from people who are interested in finding out more about this project. We're aware that the email address seems to be bouncing - it works internally, honest! Someone is fixing that right now so if you've been emailing please try again in a bit.

We've also a few posts about this blog, starting with - thanks for being first. Spineyhead also reached out and linked to us - even after we to him in our first day online. Friends now mate?

Manchizzle, who recently organised a blog meet for Manchester bloggers (wish we'd known about it!) helped us get an awkward question out of the way early by :

For this, they will not be paid - well, not in anything but traffic and bragging rights (I can hear a few people snickering already about this being a clever way for the Beeb to land themselves some free, fresh, local content). But there's no denying that this could be an opportunity for some bloggers to increase their audience...

You aren't the first person to ask if this is just about the ±«Óãtv getting some free content and we've put a lot of thought into this. It's true that some of the content from participants will appear on this blog and, perhaps, be used on the ±«Óãtv Manchester Where I Live site or on-air. We could do this, so long as it fell within the normal "fair use" clauses of copyright law, without asking anyone. But that's not what this is all about. It's about building relationships with people who are, or who want to, create stuff and publish it online. We want to help participants build their own audiences and make their efforts self-sustainable.

With those goals in mind, we'd be happy, if asked, to show participants how to sign up for , or other sources of blog revenue. It also means that rather than lifting participant's content wholesale or grabbing entire posts/videos/podcasts, instead we'll be excerpting bits and wrapping some editorial around it to encourage our audiences to visit the source. It's more of a showcase for the participants - which is why we said in the first post here that the ±«Óãtv won't actually own anything: not the infrastructure used by participants or their content.

As you say in your post, this might just be an opportunity for *some* bloggers to get a bit of promotion and traffic out of the ±«Óãtv. We hope that's exactly what it is. Thanks for giving us the opportunity to discuss that issue early on. Do feel free to comment below on our response!