Just yesterday viewers in the UK could watch live coverage of Andy Murray's easy win in Melbourne and highlights of the England cricketers being rather less convincing in victory. Alternatively they could listen to audio commentaries of both these events as well as every FA Cup replay.

And all of that was eclipsed by the numbers clicking on our most popular audio or video item that day - live coverage of Ronnie O'Sullivan's reapparance at Wembley.

As part of the ongoing development of the service, today we have made some changes, as you may have discovered or read about on the BBC News editors blog.

- A simpler approach to the way such content is displayed and accessed.

- The video player no longer has its own menu structure with indexes of content for each sport. We have found that most people browse for such content via the website’s pages and usually hit play while reading a story, following live text action or browsing a web index rather than inside the player.

- There is now a single improved page pulling the best and latest sport content together.

- If you can’t find what you want on that Video and Audio page or in the relevant sport’s pages, you can also use the audio/video search feature – just do a normal search via the box at the top of a page and then look at the list down the right-hand side, or click the audio and video tab.

- There are no changes to the way we deliver our video and audio content - it will continue to be offered in Real Media or Windows Media formats while items are available in either broadband (225k) or narrowband (34k). Some live sport and highlights is also restricted to UK viewers only.

This is just the latest in a series of planned improvements to such services and, as ever we’ll be delighted to read and respond to your feedback on the blog. Please let us know by leaving a comment or sending an email via the send a comment page.

Later this year the BBC is hoping to make wider changes to audio/video provision right across the www.bbc.co.uk website. Subject to approval by the BBC Trust, the plan is to introduce a new, unified ‘iPlayer’ service which will involve a consistent design for all audio/video players, more content on offer and the ability to download some of it.

Much of my work in BBC Sport involves some intense discussions between old and new media people about developing content for interactive platforms. And in the last few weeks we have had the most extensive discussions yet, in which I think we have each learned lots of about the others' world.

At the same time this week there seems to have been a barrage of research and comment on the future of TV/the media/web (and none of it anything to do with the big news of Michael Grade's move).

Before that, the BBC TV and radio bulletins were full of BBC News Interactive's survey confirming that online use is eroding TV viewing.

This was part of a wider report into the Future of TV by the BBC News Technology website. A lot of it was quite illuminating, even if Marketing magazine joined the debate to question the assumptions made.

But personally I was a bit depressed by the thoughts of some of the leading figures from the TV world who seem to find it difficult to literally leap outside the box.

For example Kath Beedles, Emmerdale series producer says "I love YouTube and stuff like that - but part of me thinks if you put that on telly, it would be like a slightly downmarket You've Been Framed."

This admittedly came in the same week that a new satellite channel launched with the aim of showcasing such user-generated content 24/7 and when Jeremy Paxman again shared his disdain for the whole practice by accusing his editor of making "pathetic pleas for you to send some of your old bits of home movie and the like so we can become the BBC's version of Animals Do the Funniest Things."

Personally I think YouTube including Paxman's appearance is great. At the same time much of the content also offends some of my sensibilities a lot of the time. But should such content have to be "put on the telly" and packaged up in a programme to be relevant?

YouTube is changing the way many, especially the young, consume video content. I don’t know whether that has anything to do with TV or whether it’s a different thing to TV. But it’s happening and I don’t think TV people can easily dismiss it.

Similarly Tim Hincks from Endemol complains that "It's quite hard work watching The Lord of the Rings on your iPod".

I am one of the few who hasn’t seen any of the celebrated Rings trilogy yet (it looks like hard work even on a giant cinema screen) and I wouldn’t watch all six hours of an Ashes Test on an iPod either but (if we had the rights) I would gladly take in 10 or even 20 minutes of highlights on the way to work.

This all followed some internal debate in BBC interactive teams this week about whether our video (which is largely cut from traditional TV) is really suited to the web. wired.com included the view that “the Web isn't just a support system for hit TV shows" and suggested "the way the networks look at the Internet now is like the early days of TV, when announcers would just read radio scripts on camera."

I am not sure whether you have to film everything specifically for the web. Many of our audience appear happy to consume made-for-TV Ashes coverage online but most are still watching it on TV so that will have to come first for a time.

But it is yet another challenge to the preconceptions of the major broadcasters. Most of what we knew and understand about the world is increasingly confusing anybody in TV born before 1980. And that’s most people with any power in TV - including us in the "new" media/interactive departments.

Peter Horrocks - the head of the BBC's TV News operation - has written a very interesting post on our sister blog which illustrates just how seriously he and other senior figures in news are taking things.

And this isn't just happening in the UK either - a meeting this week with our opposite numbers from France Television Interactive was like holding up a cross-channel mirror.

So no, I don’t know whether we are just talking about the future of TV - or whether you can sensibly separate TV from the rest of the media anymore.

But, having spent a lot of the past few weeks with colleagues in BBC television (and radio) sport, I am happy to say that we are at least increasingly talking about the future together, whatever it is. And that we are each thinking outside of our own boxes too.

Ultimately that should be good news for the viewer/listener/surfer - or let's just say consumer shall we?

We have noted the criticism and some people are always going to feel strongly about the decisions we have made. However I'm happy to say that if you search for one of the main football clubs and you'll find pages and pages of great content.

Every Premiership club has quite a bit there. For Man Utd there are 16 pages of results, 20 articles to a page. That's more than 300 articles. Arsenal and Liverpool are joint second in the league table with 13 pages each. After that it's Chelsea (8), Tottenham (7), Villa and Newcastle (5 each).

I've pasted some links in a full Premiership league table below.

Even in the other sports, you'll find pages and pages of content. Three pages for England cricket for example - even before the message boards for cricket and rugby and the rest have closed. A growing amount about St Helens and Hull ahead of this weekend's Grand Final.

Premiership club, link and approximate number of articles

Man Utd - 320
Arsenal - 260
Liverpool - 260
Chelsea - 160
Tottenham - 140
Aston Villa - 100
Newcastle - 100
Everton - 80
Man City - 60
Portsmouth - 60
West Ham - 60
Bolton - 40
Middlesbrough - 40
Reading - 40
Sheff Utd - 40
Blackburn - 20
Charlton - 20
Fulham - 20
Watford - 20
Wigan - 20

Equally importantly for us, and I imagine thousands of fans wanting to read and discuss the sport itself is quality as well as what the BBC calls "reach" - its overall audience. The posts on these lists are almost all about the sport or team in question. I cannot see anybody trying to provoke and insult other fans.

And I also want to mention briefly four other things.

1. The extremely sad news about Paul Hunter affected so many people and reading through almost 600 tributes to this popular sportsman on 606 is moving. Equally importantly we are linking to an external tribute site.

2. On a more mundane and far less important level, one of my colleagues Simon decided this week, that rather than writing previews of the forthcoming Heineken Cup himself, he would ask the audience. The result was a preview on every team he asked for within half a day, written from the perspective of knowledgeable fans.

3. And the forthright comment from our chief football writer Phil McNulty continues to attract interest from our audience here and away from bbc.co.uk, which is also important to us. The ratings here are perhaps predictably split with equal numbers to this particular piece probably thinking Phil was right and wrong, if his average 3 out of 5 is anything to go by.

4. Putting our old self-confessed incoherent ranter Robbo Robson on 606 is also interesting. Humour is of course by its nature subjective and in the past we have wondered how many people really enjoy his take on the week's sporting events but he seems to have captured the national mood after Wednesday's England match perfectly judging by his current (as I write) 4.46 rating.

So what next? Well we are working on how to improve a number of things. We have our own list of improvements and we definitely want yours.

Reply here - or feel free to create an article on 606 and tag it with "606" using the Other Sport/Other field - or even the Other team option. As you can see from this link this would be a really effective way of gathering everybody's constructive feedback.

These boards will be replaced by areas of the new site, which will continue to be closely aligned with existing programmes in Scotland and Wales as well as TV and radio output on Radio Five Live and BBC Sport. 606 is now designed to be for fans of all sports online and the radio programme, fresh from inviting calls about the Ryder Cup last week, is planning a number of cricket phone-ins for the winter’s Ashes series.

• To provide a richer, more in-depth user experience
• To raise the standard of contributions
• To reduce the amount of ephemeral, low-quality chat
• To make 606 more distinctive
• Raise expectations of users and of content

606 and football has always been our biggest community so many of you will be aware of the debate which has been going on in recent months. We have explained at length why we feel forum-style message boards are no longer part of the BBC’s remit in covering sport online. You can read a lot more on various posts on the BBC Sport Editors’ Blog, especially this one.
But this is a summary of our main reasons for change:

• There are message boards available for almost every sport on the world wide web, and we don’t believe that the BBC’s commitment to be distinctive in this area merits the vast expense that traditional message boards require. We want to use that same resource to offer something unique.

• While some of the message boards feature high quality content, they are still prone to people trying to annoy or provoke fellow users. Safeguards are in place on the new site to help prevent this, including a feature allowing users to remove comments posed on articles they have started.

• The new format offers interesting ways of people who play sport as well as watch it to share their experiences, and we will more easily add to the ways in which this can be done in the future (video, pictures etc) as we shift the focus away from message boards.

These changes will not be happening immediately. Some of the feedback we got from 606 was that we didn’t give enough warning and I think that is true. So we are publishing this news as soon as it has been agreed in the past few days jointly by BBC Sport, BBC Wales, BBC Scotland and BBC Radio Five Live.

Exact dates will be confirmed in the coming weeks but we are working towards the following provisional timetable:

• Fans Forum – closes at end of October 2006
• The England, Ireland, Scotland, Other Nations and Tri Nations topics on Scrum V close by start of November. A decision on the Wales topic of Scrum V is being taken by BBC Wales.
• Test Match Special – first week of November 2006
• Five Live topics for Rugby League, Tennis, Golf, Motorsport, Boxing, Athletics, Snooker, Horse Racing, Cycling, Disability Sport and Other Sport – end of November 2006

These dates are designed as much as possible to coincide with gaps in the relevant sport’s calendar. Apart from Scottish football, which is ongoing, there are no significant major events going at the time. Members have plenty of chance to move across before events such as the Ashes cricket tour or the autumn international rugby union, while we are also waiting until the end of seasons in rugby league and Formula One.

I know some of you will be upset at this news, but I do want to provide some assurances and explain new features which many will I am sure appreciate. While you can find some vocal criticism of the new format on 606 – and we’re not hiding from the need for improvement – there are many users actively creating terrific content on all the English football clubs.

On the new format the tag system of putting in your favourite team or sport allows many more communities to grow:

• Cricket fans will be able to search for content according to their Test or county team, a feature only previously there for England fans
• Rugby union fans will discover that all Premiership, Celtic league and international teams have similar searches
• Rugby league fans will be able to find content for each Super League and international team
• Motorsport fans will be able to search by different disciplines such as Formula One, rallying, motorbikes and the rest
• Fans of a vast new range of sports, previously bundled together on the Five Live other sport topic, will now be able to filter content according to their own interests.

You can create content for all these sports now, and in the next few weeks we will add the facility to write match and other event reports as well as profiles of teams and players for all the different sports. Even with no promotion and without this news, it’s great to see people are already writing already, for example, about golf.

We have one final promise for those of you who want the more traditional message board. We will allow you to paste links of any sites which pass the BBC's external linking guidelines on either the old site or the new. Our aim is to nurture alternatives to 606 as well as provide the high quality service we will offer.

As with all the changes we have made to message boards this year, we welcome your feedback here.

It follows a long hot summer of debate and development. There has been lots of discusssion about our plans involving me and users, but plenty more hard work by the team here towards the goal of launching the site by the end of September.

I reckon they have done a great job making it all happen, but will save the congratulations for an email to them!

More importantly I do want to talk here about what we have done and find out what everyone thinks about it, including those who didn't like the old 606 as well as die-hard fans.

I have also highlighted how the new site works already on 606, and gathered some comments from our first users.

I certainly didn't expect everyone to be happy but I am delighted that some great content is already being created, debated and commented upon.

So what is left to say here?

Well, while this launch is a welcome point to have reached, it is not the end of the line. In fact we see the site as the start of something really special.

All our journalists who write the stories you read on bbc.co.uk/sport and our other text services have logins. They will be creating content and inviting your comments and thoughts. I'm sure it'll be an interesting journey for us all - reporters and audience.

We're also looking forward to seeing broadcasters from TV and radio taking part, including those with their ears really close to the ground in local radio and regional television.

606 will also become a place where content on any sport, and not just football, can be created, rated and discussed. Most people, apart from the really die-hard football fan, have another sporting interest and it seemed silly to try to split up different fan communities.

Further features will arrive that will make it easier to find content - using rating and timeliness as a way of pulling the cream of content to the top of the list while ignoring anything that has been ignored or rated lowly by a large number of people.

Navigating to content on 606 is not easy enough at the moment. This is because the system that generates a list of most highly rated recent articles (such as the Premiership) cannot sustain one for every club yet. However there is a search where you can find content on any club - and not just the Premiership.

Our aim is to offer this kind of list to every supporter whose team can be found via these links, whether football club, cricket county or international team. Or rugby union and league fans.

However we didn't feel we should wait any longer before launching.

We'll also add RSS feeds so you can keep across what fellow fans are writing about - and in time I'm sure we'll be asking you to submit pictures, video and audio, or maybe links to content you have posted on the rapidly growing sites where we know many of our audience are already uploading such content.

Finally there also remains our promise to engage more users in the moderation process. We're already doing this on a very basic level, allowing any member to remove another person's comment from their content. But that is only scratching the surface and I really want us to have a trusted user scheme to help keep the site clean, on-topic and a joy to use for all fans of all sports.

I hope the new site shows how committed we are to offering a space for people to have their say about the great national obsession that is sport, especially football. As ever we welcome your opinions and I will return frequently to answer questions both here and on 606.

Others are far more qualified than me to comment on the sporting aspects of this, but what struck me was was the accuracy of the bush telegraph of rumour in the seats and bars at the ground - and that seems to me to be yet another example of the way the media is changing.

It was only an hour or so later, when the players went off for bad light/tea that someone I was with checked his mobile for the football score and we caught up with what had happened.

Dark conditions meant we headed to a bar for an extended tea break with a plan to return to seats if play definitively started. Much better than the agonising exercise of watching umpires checking light meters or for spots of rain.

So we missed the England batsmen coming out, but the rumours spreading around the ground (and updates on BBC Sport's mobile service) led us back to our seats in time to witness the Pakistan team trooping down the stairs - and back again.

Throughout all this, all we saw of the broadcast coverage were a series of interviews with TV and radio being held in front of the pavilion, completely out of earshot. And yet, everything I heard from fans around me turned out eventually to be more or less true. At various stages "Pakistan are refusing to come out", "England have won because Pakistan haven't come out" and then "the umpires are refusing to come out".

The Oval crowd might be knowledgeable but this was not of course based merely on intuition. The clue was in the number of mobile phones being held to ears and the fact that I couldn't get a GRPS signal to check our WAP site for much of this period. As is ever the case these days, nobody was out of touch for too long. (Maybe everyone had all been reading yesterday's Sunday Times.)

I can only speculate about the difference had this happened the last time I was at an England v Pakistan series in 1992 at Headingley. A few people would have been on headsets turned to Test Match Special but I reckon I would have heard 100 different rumours rather than the very consistent story everyone was telling on Sunday.

So it was a surprise that the occasional tannoy announcements saying that there was basically no information and that an update would be given as soon as it was clear were met with disbelief as well as derision. There was confusion but it seemed to me most people basically knew the score.

I am not criticising the authorities here. They must account for public order and other considerations. Their information was probably strictly accurate but it was also simply not credible when people were following the commentary box speculation via remote means.

Should they have given more information? Even broadcast the BBC commentary over the tannoy to the paying public or would that have added to the confusion?

It just goes to show that in this day and age it's almost impossible to escape the connected media world and it's a consideration any organisation needs to think about in terms of talking to your customers.

After all the changes we made earlier in the summer that is understandable. So let me apologise for recent silence and give a brief update.

I'm happy to say we're nearly ready to launch the new service. Weeks away. I'm sorry we aren't making the start of the season but I hope that's understandable given how little time there was between the end of the World Cup and now.

(It feels a like my own team Aston Villa actually. We're not quite ready with any new additions for the new campaign but I reckon we're not far away from launching a bright new era at both Villa Park and 606.)

We've talked a little bit in the past about the new 606. It will offer fans the chance to create content - match reports, other articles and even rants - about their favourite team or sporting interests, and discuss them with other users.

You'll be able to rate each other's content - and then find the highest-rated and most topical content about each team or sport. The whole thing will see a lot more interaction with programmes like the 606 phone-in itself.

A group of users is helping us with their feedback on developments. They'll get a preview of the service very soon and then, all being well, we expect to launch the service in September.

So watch this space. And so will I. Even if we don't reply to every point on this blog then rest assured we do read them and take them on board.

A while ago I talked about the amazing route guide that has been done for the Earth application. As soon as the race starts the author added in a live feature which tracks the riders along the road.

Today, as the first mountain stage begins, it's really coming into its own as riders are attacking and being dropped off the back of the bunch and of course the terrain is more interesting.

So what does this mean for the future of live sport? As technology improves will be able to follow every rider. Every car in a Grand Prix or rally? Every one of the thousands who run the London Marathon? I hope so....

And then what about football? We've been looking back at our live Virtual Replays during the World Cup and wondering whether we'll one day be able to track this for every player. And then whether the rights for this will be sold like TV and radio rights.

It's all fascinating stuff - almost as interesting as the race itself. I'm getting my fill at my desk today because tomorrow I won't see the race, on TV at least. Us editors are all at a post-World Cup awayday where we'll take a brief look back at the World Cup - and then a bigger look forward to where we go next.

The timing is atrocious, clashing with the first mountain top finish of this year's Tour, but it should be an interesting day. I might even take along my laptop with Google Earth installed and keep one eye on it. Otherwise it will be bbc.co.uk/mobile for me.

Personally I've been a bit of a loose end without football in the past couple of days (I loved some of your comments on that) so I have been looking at some other audience figures - to find out how many people have been "interacting" with the BBC around the World Cup.

Thousands of you are voting, rating, commenting, playing, sending and generally playing a massive role in the BBC Sport World Cup experience - which is really fantastic.

We don't know how many of you have contributed to our World Cup blog but we have hundreds of comments on some posts and well over a million page impressions for the tournament. It's been a fascinating journey so far, with funny items and moving content living side by side. Us editors are even letting the boys off for crashing Svan since we needed something to liven up the lull in live action.

The player ratings have also proved a hit. Every match is attracting thousands of people and for England as many as 75,000 of you have given your verdict on the team's performance. We did originally fear deliberate concerted low marking of the Germans but their fine performances have now won through any prejudice. We've been able to use this data to provide some interesting editorial material as well as giving everyone the opportunity to rate performances.

You might have noticed that to contribute to the blogs and the player ratings you don't need a BBC login. I've always had mixed feelings about registration schemes. One of the important things for player ratings is that you simply click a button and don't have to tell us your name and age but for some things they are essential and they do give further insight into the numbers of people contributing

The top 10 BBC services for participation always feature plenty of sport services - our message boards, Sportdaq and Challenge Lawro games. Last week we could say that seven of the top 10 services had a sport element to them, with people discussing the World Cup on a multitude of services including the children's message boards and BBC News Have Your Say.

Top of the charts for Sport/World Cup participation is the World Cup daq game which more than 50,000 people are clearly enjoying. Nearly as many have played the Goalfinger quiz.

That brings me, last but not least, onto our 606 service, which as many of you will be aware went through some painful pre-World Cup changes.

We've now had some data about the actual effect of what we did and I'm happy (and frankly quite relieved) to say that much of the audience has stuck with it.

There's no disguising that fewer people are contributing to 606, although with more than 12,000 active members posting material last week 606 was still bigger than any BBC message board, even if it's half the figure of the end of the football season. Early indications from some unaudited figures I probably shouldn't quote suggest that we have also lost very few of the users who read but don't contribute to 606.

However we're not complacent about this. I know that people want and deserve a better 606 so the other thing we've been doing when the matches haven't been on is getting together a project team who are now building a new service for the next football season.

We're looking for volunteers from the hundreds of thousands of people like you who are clearly interested to help us shape this, so please go here and let us know if you want to help.

And thanks again for playing your part in the World Cup. Since Germany v Argentina is already 11 minutes old, that's it from me for a few more days.

I think it's fair to everyone - the few thousand people who actively contribute to 606 and the majority who don't - to try to explain more on this subject. I want to broaden the debate about what we should do and share as much with as many people as possible. This will hopefully also answer one important question people have asked on 606 and here. What is the real reason for change – cost-cutting or editorial quality or some other hidden factor?

This post is in three parts. Firstly I will quote from and discuss extensively BBC strategy documents, which I have linked to so you can go and make up your own mind. Secondly, I will describe in detail our main interactive World Cup features. Thirdly I will discuss a few ideas which we could do next season with 606 and other sport communities. This is in the hope that you comment on them and help decide which to go ahead with.

Firstly, then the big question. What are we here for? In 2004 the government’s Graf report laid down the blueprint for the BBC website. It mentioned message boards and interaction in a couple of places, quoting what are now very out of date facts and figures, but there were no specific recommendations on the subject and in the two years since there have been few changes despite the enormous growth of blogging and of services like MySpace.

We think the old 606 format now fails in a key factor demanded by the Graf report – “distinctiveness”. Graf said the BBC should not just copy what exists elsewhere on the web and that we should do things which only our unique position allows us to do. The report told us to actively link to and promote services that already exist around the web rather than copying them.

Last year we closed our fantasy football game (with around 10 times as many members as 606) as we changed our strategy in the wake of the Graf report, which specifically stated it was something the BBC should not do. We published a page of links to alternative fantasy games.

Like fantasy football, there are hundreds of football message boards on the web so is there a need for a BBC service identical in format anymore? There was a time when to talk about football or hear other fans' voices you had to come to the BBC and listen to 606 or your local radio station. Those were the days when some of us played fantasy football by post and phone, and there was a comedy show every week about it on BBC Two!

But this just isn't the case anymore, what with blogs, forum posts, videos and pictures everywhere. Having a centralised place for all football discussion/converstation is no longer the only way to do it. For example I support Aston Villa and I can go to www.holteenders.com or www.heroesandvillains.net to talk to fans of my own team. I know of bloggers who I can follow talking about my team and other general sites where there are other team's fans.

Graf says is that where there is a “close call” between the public service value of a product and its cost then we should probably “not proceed” with the service.

Message board running costs are immense and out of proportion with usage. For Sport alone we have 10 full-time staff hosting and moderators from an outside supplier with a central technical and editorial team managing the service as a whole. There are huge hardware costs and a situation rather like a rush hour motorway whereby every time we add more server capacity to ease a "traffic jam" of messages, it has the same effect as adding a lane does to a main road. The traffic jam just gets wider and the service slows down again waiting for the next upgrade.

Over the weekend somebody on 606 quoted another lengthy document - the BBC’s Online Services Guidelines which explain how the current systems operate and why. Chapter 15 says “the BBC wishes to take advantage of the full range of user-generated services provided they fulfil our public purposes and can match the standards our users expect of our presence on the Internet”. This full range includes far more than message boards; comments, blogs, SMS and email feedback for text. And voting and “rich media” (pictures, video and audio) sent to our programmes and websites.

We have had to ask ourselves some tough questions: In the face of such change do the current boards now offer such value, even if they have done during their lifespan? Could we do better with a richer and more relevant service? And if we can't do our current message board services on the scale of 2006, what happens as more and more people come online, discover the possibilities of the web and want to contribute something to it and the BBC?

Hopefully anyone who reads this post will understand some of our initial conclusions a little better now.

So, if we’re not doing traditional message boards then what will we do instead? Now or in a few months time. I believe we have at least three main jobs to do with our participatory services:

• to enable those that want to create content to be able to do so
• to allow people to give feedback and comment on all our services
• to facilitate engagement and interaction with the BBC and its content

As far as creating content, I really want to emphasise that the current version of 606 is a temporary measure which we simply believe will allow many people to comment on the World Cup and close season without significant technical problems. It’s the only short-term option we have for keeping 606 alive at the moment and we want everyone who’s happy with the format to actively engage with it. Those who want something more like the old format are more than welcome to post links to services elsewhere on the web.

The World Cup

The streaming of BBC One matches is something that I'm sure you'll agree that only we can do - another example of distinctiveness, especially when you consider all the extra participatory services we're offering alongside.

We have a World Cup blog. This is different to a message board in that it offers you a direct line to BBC reporters and staff from TV, radio and the web in Germany. We’ll also be picking out some of the great things people are doing around the web – even linking to a really good message board somewhere else – with comments on every post.

You might ask whether a blog is distinctive? There are millions of them but none can offer this direct relationship with us as a primary broadcaster of the World Cup, something we simply haven’t managed to ever achieve consistently on message boards. It’s a subjective thing but I also think the comments on the blog are of a higher and certainly more consistent standard than message board contributions.

We also want to offer people the chance to contribute more than simple text contributions to the website. The growth of podcasting, Flickr and YouTube demonstrates the huge appetite for this. It may seem wrong to mention this in the same sentence as something as trivial as the World Cup, but the contributions from people of photos and video of last July’s London bombings proved once and for all to the BBC that there was a massive role for this kind of content in our journalism and coverage of events.

So we’re asking for you to send us pictures of your World Cup experiences in photos and video – joy, despair or just you wherever you might be watching. We want you to contribute with your views to the 606 Rant Line and Your Shout on TV. And we’ll be asking you to share with us your recreations of the best goals, celebrations or incidents you see in the tournament. We’ve already had a massive amount of high quality creative video of people doing keepy-uppies with a prize of tickets to the first England match for the winner - and I’m sure there is more to come.

For feedback, alongside the “contact us” email channel we have always had, there is now this Editors’ Blog. We’ve already taken on board and acted upon a number of comments and questions since it launched six weeks ago and it’s a great place to share our thinking and find out what people think. In contrast, feedback about BBC services on the message boards has always been dominated by abuse and unconstructive or dismissive comments.

The new Player Rater , the other major World Cup development to engage people with us and our content, is hugely significant and provides a series of interesting contrasts to message boards.

It’s not hard for anyone to realise that far more people want simpler ways to interact with TV and radio broadcasts. Millions vote for something like Big Brother - and indeed have helped choose the Sports Personality of the Year for half a century - and these numbers will probably always be higher than those who want to write text or send photos. That pointed us towards creating Player Rater, along the knowledge that football fans always have a view on player performance and could produce some really interesting talking points by giving us simple marks out of 10.

So how else does it compare to a message board? Well it is far more straightforward to manage. Abuse is limited despite the fears of some of my colleagues who thought people woud maliciously make false ratings. I knew the majority of fans wouldn't do that - and they don't.

In cost terms it's cost us as much to build as running 606 for a month or two, and the ongoing cost for use across lots of different matches is negligible. And the audience's interest? On the FA Cup Final weekend up to 150,000 people rated by either web or mobile phone. That’s at least five times the number who posted to 606 that week. The results were also discussed enthusiastically by Gary Lineker, Alan Hansen and the panel in front of a TV audience or 10 or 11 million. In terms of distinctiveness it’s hard to see anyone else able to do it.

That's about all I can remember for the World Cup. Before the tournament starts a new place will be launched on the site collecting all this and more together.

Long term - next season

If you are still reading this and saying this is all very well but we still want team message boards back then I’m sorry. Hopefully, even if you don’t agree with our decision, you’ll now understand that it has been properly thought through and that we are working on alternatives.

However we do still want to enable a full community service with ability of users to engage with each other. The plans are not fully formed and agreed yet. What follows is not a set of promises but some clear ideas which we could do relatively quickly.

I will outline them in detail and welcome any comments you have.

1. Probably the biggest single challenge for us is to restrict those who simply want to use any service to provoke fellow supporters. We’re not naïve enough to think we can ever remove this altogether but we are considering asking members to contribute a basic profile when registering which would be used for a new enhanced member page. This page could also contain links to all a member’s content and external links to where else they can found around the web.

2. As far as content, we could then allow people to start discussions of their choice, by writing an article on which fellow users could comment. It’s not that different to starting a thread on a message board perhaps, but we would hope that the other moves we’re making will help reduce the troublemakers’ influence. We would also be likely to use a similar system to enable people to comment on sports news stories or matches. BBC Sport radio and TV programmes such as 606 and Football Focus would be able to also encourage comment on different items.

3. Members could also be invited to write their own match reports, on any level of football or sport, and from their point of view. Or write profiles or tributes to their favourite players or teams. Again, others would be able to comment on these.

4. We should be able to enable readers to rate content, with the highest-ranked content getting prominent links from elsewhere.

5. Member pages could be enhanced in time with members who had good behaviour records and the highly-rated content getting more features such as a diary or message centre – or maybe the ability to upload pictures or video. We are also definitely keen to look into engaging our best members in selecting content and helping the moderation maybe via some kind of hotline alert system.

6. I know that some people will be concerned about how they will find relevant content and members with similar interests. Eventually we could allow users to form small groups, with the ability to block other members they don’t want to hear from. But from the start we would use a search facility to do this with RSS feeds from this to be used in all sorts of ways to navigate from the rest of BBC Sport and anywhere on the web.

Some of these ideas are the kinds of things which some of those angry at the 606 changes have suggested in recent days and equally others have dismissed ideas like this. We will never get a unanimous view but we need to assess all the factors and make decisions accordingly.

I think if we got one thing wrong last week it was not fully communicating our thinking and more detailed ideas so I sincerely hope this satisfies people that we are still committed to publishing content written by our users and in helping people share that content with each other.

So please do let us know here what you think of what we’re doing for the World Cup and please comment on the ideas I have shared for next season, which are described with football in mind but could equally apply to other sports.

You can comment here or if you prefer your idea not to be published go to this page and send an email via the form.

We have identified some principle aims and objectives:

• To provide a richer, more in-depth user experience
• To raise the standard of contributions
• To reduce the amount of ephemeral, low-quality chat
• To make 606 more distinctive
• Raise expectations of users and of content

Next season, the 606 format will change and will feature a number of different types of high-quality content – users can submit match reports, articles, and team/player profiles, as well as debate the latest football.

We also have plans for personal pages for users plus, in time, enhanced privileges for trusted users, members’ journals, and many more. We also want to have better links with the 606 radio show. More details on this as these ideas develop but please tell us here what you want to see too.

We have more immediate plans for the World Cup.

I’m delighted to say that 606 will revert to longer opening hours. Every day during the World Cup we’ll open at 10am and close at 11pm.

There will be three main topics:
• World Cup – for general debate around the tournament
• World Cup city guides - for people to share information about venues and stadiums
• Transfers – for domestic football

We are planning for the new topics to be in place later this week. Many 606 members will be unhappy at the loss of their team’s or division’s topic and I'm especially sorry to those supporters of the teams promoted to the Premiership who are looking forward to having their own board.

However it’s clear to us and to many users of the boards that the structure creates an antagonistic atmosphere that plays into the hands of the “wind-up merchants”. For those of you still seeking a more team-based experience we will continue to allow people to publish links to other sites.

Another major change will be that only hosts will start threads. I hope this will create a better quality of debate and content and avoid off-topic conversations.

I promise there will be no shortage of discussion – with pages for every match, story and all the latest talking points. While users won’t be able to start a thread you will be able to suggest a discussion via a postform on the site and we will publish as many of the high quality suggestions as possible. This feedback will be very important to us and will also mean our journalists can see what you want to talk about more easily.

The short delay between posts introduced last week, whereby users can only post within three minutes of their last contribution, will remain.

Finally we also have another change planned for next week which we expect will more effectively target repeat troublemakers. More details of that when it happens.

Why we have to change

We have not taken these decisions lightly. They come after various attempts to try to address some of the problems in recent months. The opening hours were reduced. We urged users to limit off-topic and overly long threads, and to help us deal with troublemakers. More recently, we introduced a gap of five and then three minutes in between users’ posts to try to improve the quality of debate.

Some of these have helped to some extent but the 606 message boards are simply not sustainable in their present format and neither do we believe they provide the best solution for interactivity and "high quality football debate". Like the rest of the BBC, be it television, radio, news or elsewhere - we also want to provide a distinctive, high-quality service.

The boards’ massive growth over the last three years is now presenting problems, not just of performance, but of financial viability and quality.

We understand that an online community evolves over time, and many users want to discuss things other than football with the fellow fans with whom they have built relationships over time. But the boards have strayed from the initial intention – providing football fans with a space for high-quality football debate - and we can no longer justify their existence in the present form. We will happily facilitate users publishing links to any online communities outside the BBC which pass our editorial guidelines.

I am very excited about our plans for the future, and firmly believe we can provide a better alternative to 606 as we know it. I really hope you share my optimism that the new boards will offer you a much better all-round experience than they currently do, and would greatly value your feedback. We will monitor your responses and suggestions closely and will publish as many of your comments as possible on this blog. You can also provide feedback on the message board. We will, of course, keep you posted about any further developments.

The best are when you get an example of something you’ve thought of yourself and never done because you (or your colleagues) have neither the time, energy or skills.

From a work perspective, the best example is Virtual Replay. In 2001 I was in Munich watching England win 5-1 and some guys in a van try to recreate the goals in 3D - and would you believe beforehand we wondered whether we’d have enough interesting incidents to try it out? It was nearly three years later when technology caught up and a different method proved successful.

I don't know whether Google Earth took that long to develop (I doubt it). But almost inevitably it is responsible for now making another dream a reality - near-3D modelling of the entire Tour de France route.

Have you done all 92 football league grounds? Or the world’s F1 circuits?

There’s fun for all the family too. My son likes to see the circuits of the Gran Turismo Playstation game – especially the New York track combined with the 3D model of the city. My parents spent hours looking for all their old homes, which I’m sure most users have done.

As if to prove that nothing brings generations together like sport, what we all wanted to see was a map of the Tour route. Until recently the organisers have seemed to guard the exact details like the military hides troop movements, at least until a few days before the event. But now this has changed so a new Earth file actually now follows the roads they’ll actually cycle along in July. All the sprints, mountains and even the feed zones are there. This was the best email I received this week!

So should we even bother with BBC Sport's route guide now? Many of you will be reading this in an office where the IT manager is not likely to allow something like Google Earth to be installed so I can assure you we will be building on what we already have in time for the race.

But it does make me wonder. In time will the Tour organisation produce these Google Earth files? Or the broadcasters covering the race - ITV, Eurosport, France Television?

I actually reckon the enthusiasts and fans who put this together are probably better-qualified than us professionals. You can argue about the quality of the public's writing or photography, but this new world is where "user-generated content" is already miles ahead of most of what those of us who get paid to this are creating. After all Google Earth appeared just before last year's Tour and within days people were creating some stuff about the route.

Now, sure, this is not purely a grassroots uprising. Google have played a major role developing a product, but Earth or things like You Tube or Flickr are nothing without the growing number of people putting incredibly strong content onto the web. Does anyone really still doubt the ability of ordinary people to create amazing things?

But allow me one moan. The quality of the photos in the Alps and Pyrenees are simply not up to scratch. So, come on Google, get a plane flying over the mountains and give us the kind of detail we get in Paris and Strasbourg in time for July.

Until then make do with a great picture of Alpe d'Huez which appeared on Velonews.com last year. No idea whether this is user-generated content or not. It's just one of the most stunning photos I've ever seen. And really that's the point - who cares who makes the content, just whether it's any good.

Perhaps the biggest immediate change is the removal of the "also in this section" list of stories from the right-hand side of story pages. The dropdown menu containing the same information disappeared a week ago too.

This has been done for a number of reasons. There is a limit to the amount of links you can put on a page before people just switch off to everything, a limit we think we have gone beyond at times, especially on some of our shorter stories.

All our research and testing shows that very few people actually use the "also in this section" links so these were the unlucky ones when the difficult choice was made about which links should go.

So the lead story as I write this contains some relevant stories about Wayne Rooney - either from our site or others via our links to other sport sites. These are in a list which I don't think is too long.

Under the old system this list would have contained less directly relevant links about Luke Young, Michael Dawson or Sven's departure. All these stories may still be of interest to England fans so they are still available on the main England World Cup page which is a linked from the story, but we don't think they're absolutely essential to have on this page.

The other more visible change is the move of the audio and video links away from the right-hand side to the central column of stories. This is partly again to "de-clutter" the right-hand side of stories but it is also a recognition that audio and video links are increasingly important to the audience who want to see them in a consistent place, four paragraphs in to the story.

You will also see some other cosmetic changes. In keeping with each sport on the site having its own banner with a different colour (football is red, cricket is green, rugby=blue etc) various visual features are being changed from the greys and purples of old to these colours. We also have a much tidier new link to user-generated content that features some of the really interesting quotes that users increasingly come up with on key stories.

There are also some changes happening to the bottom of stories - new colours and some different links added while others are removed. This is all following research into what people click on, and our index pages will also change in the coming months to reflect this.

The other changes will become apparent when we are doing live events over the coming weeks, especially during the World Cup, Wimbledon and Test cricket. A new form of navigation will start to more sensibly link together coverage in words, pictures and audio/video plus new interactive features. I'll return to discuss this when we have an example.

Despite our research and testing, we are sure not everyone will like all these changes and as ever they will take some getting used to for us all. Please let us know what you think or pose any questions here.