ABC Website goes Web 2.0

The Australian Broadcasting Commission website abc.net.au now sports a range of Web 2.0 features, including tagging and RSS.

While the redesign itself has been incredibly subtle, the developers have obviously put a huge amount of effort to overhaul the information architecture for the site.  It now features far superior navigation.

This is one of the first websites in Australia to really embrace the concept of tagging (read my blog on tagging to find out more about this great new way to navigate websites).  Tags are now absolutely everywhere on the site, especially in the ABC News section.

The website is littered with dynamic AJAX, features, enabling embedded multimedia, such as podcasts to pop out from the main content.

Additionally, the tags are aligned with RSS feeds, so that you can now generate an RSS feed on an user defined subject, rather than just accept the ones that the webmasters decides that people might be interested in.  This means that ABC news can now be syndicated to other websites much more easily, which gives ABC a huge edge on other online news services.

There is a user "Tag Library" and "My Tags" section, and even a tag cloud.  These sections require cookies to be enabled on a users browser, but if you enable them, it greatly enhances the user experience.  Each story has its own tag list and there is a "Hot Tags" section at the top of each page which what people are interested in.  Users can bookmark their favourite stories/pages.

These are great additions so the site and I'd expect to see more sites soon following the lead.