I attended the BBC Knowledge Multiplatform briefing day yesterday. The strategy outlined by Simon Nelson and others thankfully counteracted the soporific effects of being located in an airless room in the bowels of Broadcasting House, as the sun beat down on the London streets (it ain’t called the ‘big smoke’ for nothing).

Here are the highlights:

On ‘Permanence’ – Signalling a radical shift from the ephemerality of the linear broadcast slot, the BBC now has a system to automatically generate a permanent web page for every programme episode which, over time, can be further enriched with ratings, recommendations, synopses, AV, track listings and so on. As well as prolonging the life of the content beyond transmission and making it findable and linkable, the system has released time and budget previously spent on often rapidly pulled together and under-performing programme-related sites.  It’s currently in its beta version - visit it here.

So far so good; I can find out more about that track I liked in last week’s Mad Men for example. But what is so much more exciting is the prospect of applying the same system to the BBC archive – tens of decades of radio and television content opened up and made findable, shareable and mashable. Of course, as with most BBC projects of this scale and ambition – from the launch of BBC Two through expansion from terrestrial to digital in the late 90s to the launch of the iPlayer in late 2007 - the usual debates around public service and commercialism will no doubt rage.

Will the content be free at the point of use? Will it be limited to British people as licence-fee payers or made globally available but at a fee to non-UK residents? How might the release of such content impact upon the broader commercial market? These are just some of the potential areas of contention. I assume the findings from the Creative Archive pilot will feed significantly into the BBC’s thinking from here.

On ‘New Forms’ - Utilising some of the time and money released by the automatic programme site generation system, and in line with the ‘fewer, bigger, better’ approach to commissioning projects that ‘cut through’ a packed mediascape, the BBC are interested in experimenting with new multiplatform forms. These could relate directly to linear programmes, as in the case of ‘Britain from Above’ and the upcoming ‘The Truth About Crime’ (whose online element exposes the data behind the creation of the programmes, using crime maps to analyse crime patterns etc.) or they might fall into the other category of ‘Products’.

Defined as ‘audience facing online tools or services focused on delivering one clear user benefit’, examples of Products include sites as the popular recipe finder or the ‘Your Paintings’ project. Being conducted in collaboration with the Public Catalogue Foundation, Your Paintings is a scheme to put every publicly-owned oil painting online (a project we at Cogapp are obviously following with particular interest).

Finally, on ‘Connections’ - Simon spoke about BBC Topics, an enhanced search that pulls together everything the BBC has on a topic with what else is out on the web. The vision is to move away from themed hand-cranked sites such as ‘Science’ towards automated aggregations of AV, user-generated content, external links and, in full circle, the immeasurably rich BBC archive.

In summary then, the BBC is currently attempting a monumental exercise in joining the dots. What picture emerges, and the role independent agencies are able to play in its creation, remains to be seen.