The site, which contains recorded videos playable on the website, covers political debates from around the UK and the European Parliament, won in the Use of Web Platforms category after receiving praise for presenting material "consistently and attractively" and for being a "powerful and innovative" tool.
But did you know it existed?
You could be forgiven if you answered ‘no’ because it made its quiet arrival at the beginning of last November and has hardly been publicised around the BBC News homepage. But apparently this was part of the strategy as the BBC announced the news via social media sites such as Twitter because “such is the power of social media that people were quick to find us and start tweeting about the site.”
Anyway, for those who didn’t know about the site previously – it is the work of utter genius and brings together live and on-demand video coverage of proceedings as well as content in the form of biographies and guides to each institution and to who makes the decisions in the UK's systems of government.
But the real magic lies in the site's search function which allows you to search for certain words amongst political speeches!
By its very nature, politics is lengthy. Could you imagine having to watch an entire debate – which can go on for as long as five or six hours – just to find a specific reference to a project or policy? You probably could but you'd need to be a battle-hardened political observer or someone with a very keen interest in the subject to do so...But the search feature makes it possible to search for a specific word or words spoken in the proceedings and it will produce immediate links to the points in the video in which it/they were spoken. Clever.
What I like even more is the "follow your representative" feature, which allows you (once you have located your local MP or MEP or any other come to that) to “follow” their activity in proceedings via a generated list with again direct links to their involvement in a particular debate.
The sum of these innovations is an excellent tool, and not just for political bloggers such as myself! If you haven’t already locate your local MP and MEP yourself at bbc.co.uk/democracylive.
Democracy Live has made politics truly 'live' and easy to follow – so it should come as no surprise it is already winning awards. (Shame the same cannot be said about the European Parliament’s TV station EuroParl TV…)
