They’re changing Gear

Actually that should be that they’re changing Top Gear – but the headline didn’t really work if I added the word Top before the Gear.

Basically the point of the post is that there will very soon be a new look TopGear.com – not sure if the public service site will be getting a make-over but the commercial one certainly is.

It looks pretty good – from the looks of the beta we’re in for wood panelling backgrounds, glassy effects and very web 2.0ey fonts and colours.

See another picture of the homepage at the bottom of this post v

They seem to be taking the social media thing a lot more seriously as well – they’re splitting the blogs up into: Horsepower, Transmission, The Foreman, The Cupholder, Fast and Dangerous and Sunday Afternoon Club (F1 blog that looks like it may be tied to the BBC F1 coverage somehow).

Playing around with the beta for a while it looks like the blogs are WordPress hosted – which is an interesting departure for the BBC which uses MovableType for its public service blogs.

Interesting that the BBC public service blogs are hosted on a closed commercial platform and the BBC commercial blogs seem to be hosted on an open source free platform! Hmmm

As well as the very good looking, branded blogs – which will see James May and Richard Hammond join Jeremy Clarkson and Andy Willman as TG.com contributors – there’s a new media player.

It isn’t exactly the same as the EMP (BBC Embedded Media Player) used on bbc.co.uk/topgear (for a start the volume only reaches 10) but it is flash based AND unlike the /topgear player – it actually lets you embed the video.

Or at least that’s what the press release says: “nearly 300 new videos in a bright, big player that allows you to share or take away and out them on your own site.”

Although I haven’t actually been able to find the embed code yet – just a series of links to let you put the video on your social networking platform of choice. I’ll keep looking though.

You can of course just view the source code around the video player to get the embed code.

Episode Guide

There’s also something TopGear has needed for a while – something I started building myself (but got bored/lost interest/got to busy), something available in a very plane way on Wikipedia and something the good folks over at FinalGear are doing.

The most interesting feature of the Episode Guide on the new TopGear.com is the ‘The One With…’ feature – this makes it a lot easier for the more casual fan to find out about an episode.

There isn’t really much more to say about the Episode Guide – it primarily focuses on giving you video clips of that episode (which is what it’s all about really) and has a few little snippets of episode information.

For example: “The one where… Stig outruns a speed camera” and “This is also the one with… Clarkson reviews the Citroen Berlingo (and likes it) and Das Mazda6: Richard finds out if the Mazda6 can take on the Germans”.

Actually – quiz for you – without looking at the site can you tell me which episode this applies to: “The one with… all the poo”.

So back to the blogs

Instead of having the odd article (from the magazine) by Jeremy and James as an article under news and then the odd article by them in the blogs – they’ve now created a blog specifically for pieces by the ‘presenters’.

There is an outline of what each blog will do in the TopGear.com article about the new look site – due to launch on Thursday (although I’m sure it said Wednesday a week ago).

One of the blogs will be called ‘Horsepower’ and will include contributions from Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond. There’s also the suggestion that they will respond to comments. Apparently “if what you write is interesting enough, they’ll respond to you.”

‘Transmission’ is all about TopGear the show and will be written by Executive Producer Andy Wilman – in much the same vain the existing TopGear Blog is written I imagine.

Then you have the blogs by the magazine team. ‘The Foreman’ is apparently going to be full of inside information and will tell you “everything the car makers would rather you didn’t know.”

‘The Cupholder’ is the oppose and will be full of “is pure trivia, videos, links and general trivia from all over the world and all over the world wide web.”

And then there is the non F1 racing stuff with ‘Fast and Dangerous’ and the F1 blog in the form of the ‘Sunday Afternoon Club’.

Speaking of the F1 Blog – apparently they “have big plans for that when the BBC takes over the F1 coverage next year.”

/topgear

Then there’s the BBC and the issue of what will happen to /topgear with the launch of the new look and fully interactive topgear.com.

On the FinalGear Forum – controlspecimen asked the question of the public service Top Gear site “So.. is bbc.co.uk/topgear defunct now?”

That’s an interesting question – the problem is that bbc.co.uk/topgear isn’t allowed to link to topgear.com for a lot of political reasons.

So there is a bit of a requirement/expectation that the BBC has at least some kind of public service site for one of its most popular shows.

I wonder whether they will just move it towards /programmes instead – a number of programmes just have their own branded /programmes site now. Seems to make more sense than building their own site.

But there might also be an expectation that /topgear is kept and includes advert free versions of all the videos on topgear.com for a UK audience.

More still

There’s also all the usual games, car news, car stuff and a car chooser.

Actually the car chooser is pretty cool – in stage one you tick a few boxes for what you want in a car, stage two you move a slider to show how much you want to spend.

And in stage three you refine your choices.

It then orders the cars and you can add as many as you like (I think) to your ‘car bar’ that you can then use to compare your shortlist and read a mass of technical details, see photos and read the TopGear review.

It’s all very impressive and I can’t wait until its finished and live. It’s going to be great to have another place to regularly read the writings of Misters May, Clarkson and Hammond.

Oh and it looks like TopGear will be back on TV around 2 November – I’ll try and do a piece soon on what’s going to be in the upcoming series.

Speaking of which – there will also be a schedule that shows when TopGear is on TV – although most of the time it will just be repeating the word Dave over and over and over again.

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