My Favourite Film of 1929.

Film After last week's visit to blogging in 2005, let's shift backwards in time slightly further to 2002 and the BBC's The Collective, a cultural review website from a time when the corporation's online offering was experimental and exciting, when the idea was to simply try things out and see if they stuck, bend the remit of what the BBC could and should be doing for the public, but on the main site and not in a walled off garden like often brilliant BBC Taster.

Utilising the same log-in technology as the H2G2 website (a user submission version of the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy), a profile I still retain today to access the iPlayer, The Collective allowed users to submit reviews of all aspects of culture so that it would appear alongside the work of professional reviews and other editorial content.

Rowan Kerek, the editor of the site was kind enough to contribute to Review 2003 and Rowan's answers are still readable here.  I think she's the Rowan who was later mentioned on the Wittertainment show.  I wonder if it was her idea to call the user pages "my space" just before myspace was founded (ask your grandparents).

Having my own blog, I mainly posted over there for the purposes of trying to win the weekly prize being handed out, I think at random, which I managed to win on several occasions.  Prizes included a Turin Brakes t-shirt which I still wear despite never being a fan and a dvd of Man With A Movie Camera, the first time I saw the film.

The BBC hosted version was finally pulled some time in 2014 but as with all of these old projects it lives on as part of the Wayback Machine and here's a link to the final iteration which includes a link to an editors note explaining that the website is about to close in 2008 when the first wave of programme pages were introduced and the philosophy of the website changed.

Here's my old profile which functions surprisingly well considering.  As you can see I copied the about me from this blog but there's plenty of content which didn't originally appear over here which I've now copied over with the correct date stamps which I'm the process of resurrecting and can be read more easily at this tag, or at least what can be salvaged.

Although the editorial offer now looks quite standard, then there wasn't another part of the BBC really covering these topics in this way and it stands very much as a forerunner to the channels Radio One and Six Music would become and an ancestor to the approach that's now enshrined at the BBC Three website, not to mention BBC Arts.