The BBC has been playing with blogs, on and off, for the last couple of years. There was even an official Scotblog but that seemed to come to an end in November 2004. There have been any number of articles which resemble weblogs, where new content is added to the top of an article to display breaking news, such as the reports from Iraq and even weekly posts such as From the Editor’s Desktop (now sadly defunct). As Pete Clifton said in one of his FtED columns, they’ve tried to hold off calling something a weblog unless it was powered by proper weblog software, either bought or home-grown, and deployable at any place within the BBC News site.

Well, it looks like they’re starting to investigate those choices a bit more thoroughly.

Nick Robinson, the BBC’s Political Editor has a weblog on http://blogs.bbc.co.uk/nickrobinson/, powered by Six Apart and so is very probably Movable Type 3.x. “Proper” weblog software if ever there was such a thing.

You can also visit http://blogs.bbc.co.uk/ and see that it’s a republishing of Nick’s posts, and so is probably intended to be an aggregated view over all of the BBC’s webloggers using Six Apart’s system (or anything they liked, if it was being generated from RSS and Atom feeds). It’ll be interesting to see if the BBC get anyone else into this, and if so, who exactly it will be.

Tragically, Paxman will probably be too busy.

Or, as the spool point out, it could of course be TypePad. meh.