Welcome to Muddy Boots

Muddy Boots is a project prototype commisioned by the BBC to investigate the ways in which social metadata can be utilised within the BBC. It's called Muddy Boots because we imagined the boots (URLs) of the great unwashed trampling over the pristine BBC carpet (News pages) :)

This project came out of a BBC Labs commission from a brief to improve the way people find and navigate their way around BBC and non-BBC content. The service is described below but if you're interested in knowing more about the research and some of the lessons learnt, it's explained here.

What does it look like ?

The Muddy Boots system simply augments any BBC news story with extra sidebar content 'Muddy Boots Internet Links' but it also provides a link to the metadata that was generated and used to rank the recommended external URL's. An example is shown below:

How does it work ?

The system uses data from Wikipedia, del.icio.us and a custom algorithm to recommend links based on different ranking metrics. A description of the process is provided here.

I want to try it !

It's really easy :

• To submit a new story, click the 'Submit a story' link at the top of the page.
• To view existing stories, click the 'Show me some links' link on the banner at the top of the page.

Alternatively, here are some preprocessed stories to try :

• Organic food sales hit £2bn in UK
• Brown hails 'courageous' Mandela

How do I find out more ?

Contact Rattle, leave us a comment or drop us a mail.

For information on changes to the system, view the Muddy Boots changelog.