The Robin Good Show

Paul Gerhardt is the Director for the BBC Creative Archive one of the most innovative media communication projects to take place in recent times. The BBC Creative Archive , launched in 2004 and allows people to download clips of BBC factual programmes from bbc.co.uk for non-commercial use, keep them on their computers, and also edit, remix and share them, making the BBC's video content archive more accessible to its stakeholders. I have had the pleasure to invite out for lunch Paul Gerhardt during his recent stop-over in Rome for the OECD international conference . During our fast walk to the restaurant, under the light roman rain, I learned quite a bit about the BBC Creative Archive and its overall strategy for giving back value to quality television content, which after having been aired, gets little or no opportunity to be re-seen, edited and re-used for personal uses or educational applications. In this clip Paul Gerhardt provides his own answers to the key question of what blogs really are and what teir roles are within our media ecosystem. Paul Gerhardt Interview - text transcript " A daily connection of ideas and information. I used to think of a blog as an online public diary. I now see it as more a kind of personal scrapbook that is an assembly of ideas and content drawn from a number of places, but that usually is managed by an individual thinking through what they want to express and what they want to do. I'm not sure how it's going to evolve, but I see it as a very, very exciting way of breaking through the current structures of how we provide information and how we have a public dialogue. It's a completely different way of doing it. There's an interesting issue at the BBC that many senior BBC executives have suddenly started to write their own blogs. There's been a debate at the BBC about what this means, because if you are a senior news journalist and you are appearing on news programs and then suddenly you are writing your own blog as well, where do the news values fit in? How do they work together? And that is an important debate. "