What Do You Remember?

The Time When, the latest website to come from the BBC’s experimental arm, has just been announced by Phil Gyford.

It’s a place for people to record their memories, and it looks quite nice so far although there’s not a lot of data in there yet.

Some first thoughts on the how it could be even better though, in case they’re reading and because part of the announcement seems to be to start gaining feedback…

A minor techie thing to start with - the URLs aren’t very hackable. Surely www.thetimewhen.co.uk/memory/2006/07/16/memorynumber would be better and let people explore more easily. Such a URL structure would also encourage the provision of some other very useful pages - …co.uk/memory/2006/07/16/ would show me all the memories for yesterday, and …co.uk/memory/2006/07/ would give all the memories for July 2006 and of course …co.uk/memory/2006/ would give everything for this year. Or maybe just a calendar showing each day with the number of memories for that day shown by making the day’s number/background/whatever more eye-catching? Start with pale grey for days with no events, and run through to bright red bold text for those with lots of memories…

It isn’t very easy to browse round memories at present. The popular and most recent lists on the home page are a good start, but are heavily skewed to major events like September 11th 2001. If I search for a year I’d like to get the memories from that year, not the memories from today’s date in that year. It would also be good if the individual day pages, in addition to their “previous day / next day” links also had “previous day with a memory / next day with a memory” links, so I can just pick a random day somewhere and still find memories to read about around that time.

I also wonder what the earliest memory is. A search for 1066 did seem like it had found some links, but that’s only because it’s finding things in the Wikipedia data feed. Unfortunately you can’t see what memories William the Conqueror had ;-)