³ÉÈËÂÛ̳

Cost is a very poor excuse. I believe part of the redesign is to allow advertising to be placed on the right hand side (in territories other than the UK) so hopefully the blog pages will be self financing.

Thanks for the heads up on the 400 character limit. More social media but less social. I guess that you will be losing some of us, but that's the age of austerity.

(132 characters)

A question for the website team: Will the Perston's Picks RSS feed be automatically updated? If not, is there a directory of all ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ blogger RSS feeds?

The new blog certainly has a 'glossier' look, but I can't find anything much better to say about it.

I guess it comes down to what the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ deems to be the most important part about a blog - the way it looks, or the ability of followers to engage in debate. Gavin Hewitt's blog (which I used to follow) has already completed the move and the reader contribution element of it really is dreadful - the main page only features the 'editors pick' of comments, which I fundamentally dislike, and when you click to view all comments they are not that easy to read.

A great shame especially with this blog, more so than the others given the dedicated following it has.

(539 characters - without making much of a point, oh dear)

This is clearly a capitalist conspiracy.

400 characters. Oh dear!

Fine to limit the length of comments, but 400 characters is way too few.

I've given up commenting on other ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ blogs as 400 characters is far too limiting - okay for a sound bite, bit not near enough to offer a considered opinion.

I blame the banks. (15 characters)

Hi Robert,
I was (and still am) haunted by my lack of prescience, when the 2008 financial Tsunami hit us. Since then, I've carefully tracked the forecasting, rather than reflecting, editorial. Governments don't do it - they tell you everything after the event - essentially disingenuous. You at least leave the clues that ordinary people like me must now recognise and treat as working assumptions. Will you continue to do this, please - in your new guise?

Only 400 characters? Will we be counting the cost of the blanks?

Use longer words - less spaces!

Cost is a pretty poor excuse considering a 2TB (room for 1 000 000 000 000 characters. Perhaps half that to include backups) hard drive costs £55

Perhaps a poor IT architecture is the cause?

I suppose that means the usual suspects will treat us to short tedious rants rather than long tedious rants.

And by the way, the picture at the top of this blog is obviously staged - all good movers turn the boxes upside down, just like you've been quite rightly trying to do with the banks!!

Oh dear, 400 characters and 300 seconds between posts, who is counting?

If you enjoy our comments so much, how come you never reply to them with comments of you own?

Blimey!... only 400 characters.

I rekon there will be many multiple posters in future.

I suggest the use of:- (to be continued).

That way you can take a break from composing your post. Neat!

There is a four hundred letter word for this

Afternoon Robert,
how on earth will YOU be able to put your points across in 400 characters or fewer?
Do not the licence fee payers have a vote on this redesign?
We pay for this service and do not accept the new diktat!
The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ belongs to the licence-payers not to the bean counters.
Freedom for the Peston one now!

Oh well...they wanted to kill off the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ web site and it looks like that is what they are doing, shame as it really is the jewel in the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s crown.

Is there anywhere to register a complaint about this?

Tweets - god help us all - blogs were the rare thing left on the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ to protect us from the celebs?

Or ..... is that we are left with the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ department of tweets? Will Twitter buy the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ via the beloved Murdoch Corp - via the Conservative Party - via JH? Freedom of speech may just allow this comment to squeak past the Mods?

Is the cost to do with moderators, storage, bandwidth?

Hey, Robert Peston's blog, finally got round to writing.

Why do you have to talk in that very strange way? It sounds like your in a great deal of pain. the content is great but why do you need to overemphasise every single phoneme?? you have steadily been getting worse and i am at the point of switching off.

Bye Robert - nice knowing you. Your blogs have always been very educational and I will miss all of the comments and elaborations from Worldwide contributors.

BIG MISTAKE ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳!

Testing

y blog is dead. Long live the new blog. Or to put it another way, my page - and those of other ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ bloggers - is having a makeover. So if you don't want to read on, and you simply want to read my latest post, click here.

The reason for the change is to bring together more of my output in one place. So on the new page, you'll find many of my TV and radio pieces, and (soon) my tweets.

If I go mad and decide to do other social media, that'll be there too.

Fingers crossed that you like what you see. I can't hope that all of you will love all the changes. And in particular, I am sure some of you will be frustrated that (for cost reasons) there is now a 400 character limit on the comments you can leave.

Please don't let that put you off expressing yourselves. I can't tell you how much I value your opinions and the debate we have.

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

24. At 01:45am 13th May 2011, SirLoinsaaalot wrote:

Testing

y blog is dead. Long live the new blog. Or to put it another way, my page - and those of other ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ bloggers - is having a makeover. So if you don't want to read on, and you simply want to read my latest post, click here.

The reason for the change is to bring together more of my output in one place. So on the new page, you'll find many of my TV and radio pieces, and (soon) my tweets.

If I go mad and decide to do other social media, that'll be there too.

Fingers crossed that you like what you see. I can't hope that all of you will love all the changes. And in particular, I am sure some of you will be frustrated that (for cost reasons) there is now a 400 character limit on the comments you can leave.

Please don't let that put you off expressing yourselves. I can't tell you how much I value your opinions and the debate we have.

Oyeeeeeeeees


Definately more than 400 words their

Test 224. At 01:45am 13th May 2011, SirLoinsaaalot wrote:

Testing

y blog is dead. Long live the new blog. Or to put it another way, my page - and those of other ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ bloggers - is having a makeover. So if you don't want to read on, and you simply want to read my latest post, click here.

The reason for the change is to bring together more of my output in one place. So on the new page, you'll find many of my TV and radio pieces, and (soon) my tweets.

If I go mad and decide to do other social media, that'll be there too.

Fingers crossed that you like what you see. I can't hope that all of you will love all the changes. And in particular, I am sure some of you will be frustrated that (for cost reasons) there is now a 400 character limit on the comments you can leave.

Please don't let that put you off expressing yourselves. I can't tell you how much I value your opinions and the debate we have.

Maybe 400 characters (of the different type) will be all that you'll attract to the new blog given the new limit - unless we have to (perish the thought) write in txt frmt 2 gt all our thghts aX

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

Hi folks, I don't do blogs and have never posted here before AFAIK. But when I clicked on this one. I was fascinated by the diversity of opinion and most of all by those that thought and spoke out of the established norm! I do hope that it will not change too much. I do a few forums but this is by far the most fascinating! What is 'democracy' and capitalism all about anyway? Could it be us?

Well, my first post may well have gone over the 400 character limit! It seems that it is awaiting moderation! How will this do?

What happened to my previous comment? Not even shown as under moderation. The thought police are at it again.

The postings from before and during 'the cuts demo' where marvellous. In that the whole of the economic, political and population control system where called into account.

Yes 20. Tweets and Murdoch's control empire Must Rule OK? BTW. How many characters do you get in a tweet or SMS?

It is so annoying to write something here and it takes a while for it to appear. I wish the great Tommy Boyd - The broadcaster extraordinaire could finally get back to media where he can be controversial and confrontational. And where we may respond in real time!

I'll be back! But, it's the delay in the comments coming up that is killing it! I am told that I must wait 300 seconds before making another comment!

Iwishorganisationswouldbehonestratherthanmakingupexcuses.400charactersisacostissue?No-it'sawayofcontrollingposterssothatwecan'tusethisblogasourown,andcanonlycomment,notwriteameaningfulessay.It'sthesametypeofexcuseas'healthandsafety'or'dataprotection',ortheworstone'childprotection'-it'sbull.

If the Beeb wants to constrain our comments, then be honest about why. AS an earlier poster mentioned, disk space is too cheap. The cost of re-architecting the blog and putting a limit on it will have been higher than 10 years worth of disk space.

400 characters lead to bad argument and the of the rumour mill of the social networking sites full of junk.

Most posts are under 400 characters so they won't be affected. My only other post (this is my 2nd) was WELL over 400 characters. Posts are all pre-moderated anyway.

This 400 character limit will only serve to limit reasoned argument. Very Reithian

"And in particular, I am sure some of you will be frustrated that (for cost reasons) there is now a 400 character limit on the comments you can leave."

Um...right. Not good enough. How many Gb of storage do YOU think the total comments left on your blog has used since day one? If it's more than 5 Gb (which would be a small library's worth) I'd eat my own face.

The reason is not true. End of story. The real reason is "The developers made it this way and can't be bothered to fix." How many times have I (a programmer) been told by a boss in the past to make up lies like this to non-techies?

If you can't say it in less that 400 words it probably isn't worth reading... quality, not quantity!

Agree with Kit Green. These changes are usually to do with money. The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ messed up the sports homepage by creating extra space for adverts (outside the UK), then denied it was anything to do with that.

Anyway, in Robert's case it's the content not the form we follow, so never mind.

"If you can't say it in less that 400 words it probably isn't worth reading... quality, not quantity!"

CHARACTERS, not words. If you can't read you probably can't write...care, not speed!

Terrible decision - but don't just complain here - make a formal complaint. Let's see if we can get the decision reversed

Can't we get the taxpeyer to give us another 400 characters and then subtract a bonus of 600 characters, leaving us a paltry 200....

Robert and the Beeb

What a good idea. For a long time all the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ blogs has been hijacked by a small group of Marxists or by people who want use the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s online traffic to promote their own theories in staggeringly boring detail. This should take care of both in one fell swoop. Just one thing - is your blog still going to be all about banks, football clubs and Rupert Murdoch or will we get a proper "business" blog?

Only 400 characters?
Great.
Long, rambling posts are seldom read - and seldom worth reading.