With that in mind your original post is not exactly a neutral perspective – it’s a shame you didn’t include this in the OP.

For the three people you’ve named I can think of plenty of people amongst the most talented I’ve worked with who are still at the BBC

that’s right. do the math.

I’m not saying you’re not entitled your opinion, you’re even free to post it on my blog. But I’m not clear from what capacity you’re able to really able to back up such a sweeping conclusion.

I’m not so bothered about your points about BBC management, but that you downplay the issues regulatory and legacy issues.

You specifically poo-poo the isues around ‘regulatory requirements’ but actually it’s a fundamental and genuine issue. Flickr can have people on their equivelent of message boards post stuff about ‘cunts’ and making references to pussys, etc (see the link in my post). If a BBC employee allowed that kind of content to be published to a BBC message board they would probably be fired.

That’s just a microcosm example, but the point is it either costs a lot of money to check all that content or such functionality simply has to be dropped.

It doesn’t matter whether the current BBC New Media management stays or goes, these kinds of issues will remain. It comes down to the position that the BBC finds itself in. It has all sorts of obligations to deal with that the commercial sector simply doesn’t have to worry about.

So you often work with what you’ve got–and in your case you did and turned out a decent service for which you deserved your award on Monday

But license payers deserve more than a poor performance compared to Yahoo or Flickr–we wouldn’t expect a shambles in TV (or for the BBC to have refused to implement better production processes and technologies), shouldn’t we have the same expectations for our Web apps?

But it was a team effort — and the community too!