Being at the start of a new interactivity/blog site, it might be worth thinking a bit about the lessons we could learn from elsewhere.

Over the years, I've been involved in various weblogs and discussion forums, from a movie mailing list at university in the early nineties through to Facebook today, so I feel I can speak with experience, if not with authority.

As a political geek, I tend to look at these things from the standpoint of political discussion, and it has to be said that overall the history of political discussion on the internet is not a cheerful one. Partisan politics, whether of the Kossack or Freeper variety, is well-served, and Obama has shown the power of the web to raise money. But it does all feel very much like the continuation of politics by other means - not the new paradigm that we were promised back in the netty 90s.

 I'm going to use this post, and the next two or three, to discuss some of the interactive websites I've used, and what I think are their good points and bad points. Let's start with British media's 140 pound gorilla, the BBC.

You might think that with the budget of a small country and twenty squillion page views a day, the BBC could get interactivity right. But you would be wrong. In fact, the BBC has produced two real horrors when it comes to interactivity: the dismal failure that was iCan and the equally dismal success that is Have Your Say.

A long time ago, in 1998 or thereabouts, I worked on an edemocracy project that never really got anywhere, called Netopolis. The small group of us who were designing the site were aghast to discover that the BBC were building an edemocracy website as well. Surely, we thought, with their money and people, they would produce a fantastic effort that would draw in millions of people and leave our amateur effort in the dust. As it turned out, Netopolis launched, and never really took off through lack of interest and failure to reach critical mass. Much the same could be said of the BBC's project, which became iCan.

British Broadcasting Corporation, one. Four amateurs meeting in a north London pub, one.

 iCan, which was set up in 2002 or thereabouts, rebranded a couple of years ago as BBC Action Network, and will be closing down forever in the middle of next week. It started from the premise that people like to think  about local issues that concern them, which is fair enough. It provided tools for users to start campaigns and discuss issues in their localities, which would have been quite workable if the site had had a lot of users across a wide area. As it was, every time I logged in, I would find out that there were no campaigns under way in the bit of rural England where I then lived. Would I like to start one, the site suggested, with a hint of desperation.

I am sure there were some users on iCan, somewhere, but its localist straitjacket gave it the worst returning user experience imaginable. It might just as well have put up a banner saying "move along please, nothing to see here".

In any case, why would I want to start or join a campaign, particularly? I might just want to vent, or to say that things were just fine as they were and didn't need to change. iCan failed in part because of its overambitious structure, but the more serious failure was fundamentally flawed model of how people want to interact online.

The BBC didn't make the same mistake next time. Their Have Your Say feature, now attached to many articles, caters for the way people want to interact online in the same way that McDonalds caters for the way people want to eat food : quickly and without thought. It's therefore inordinately popular (and bad for you).

Have Your Say allows users to post comments on news articles, and that's it. There isn't a direct 'reply' function and there is no persistence of personality (you have to log in to post but there are no profile pages that allow other users to see information about you). The results have been predictably depressing : snack-food opinions and rampant prejudice. The prevailing tone of the comments is self-righteous right wing outrage, something which will be familiar to anyone who has seen the British tabloid press. The inanity of the comments has even spawned a blog devoted to the stupidest ones, called Speak You're Branes.

More annoyingly still, the fact that there is no reply function means that the most outrageous lies and quarter-truths are left to stand as fact, with the huge volume of comments making cross-referencing impossible.

This is not to say that the BBC should only be promoting something Serious like OpenDemocracy, which often feels like a gruelling seminar at an Oxbridge college, but it does have a responsibility to support informed discussion, and not just knee-jerk reaction. Perhaps because of their statutory duty to be politically neutral, the BBC have shied away from anything that might have the tone of a debate, and in doing so have let their media market dominance go to waste again.

The BBC, under a previous Director-General, used to proclaim it had a "mission to explain". Unfortunately its web offering at the moment values opinion and prejudice over fact and explanation.