h2g2 so impressed the BBC that they bought both the site and my team
One month after its launch, I became Editor of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (h2g2), the website founded by author Douglas Adams. I was solely responsible for developing the editorial direction of the site, and I built up a seven-person content and community team from scratch, driving the project forward from start-up to success.
I was in charge of the content and community areas of the project, and for a short period I also managed the project's development process. I wrote a number of Perl-based in-house tools to do statistical analysis of the site, and worked directly with SQL Server to develop a completely new editorial process; this led to the Peer Review system that is still a central part of the site.
By the start of 2001 the Director of BBC New Media was so impressed with h2g2 that his department acquired the site and my team, incorporating them into BBCi. Under my editorship h2g2 became the BBC's busiest community website, and it continues to thrive today as part of the BBC website.
Following this success, I played a central role in developing h2g2 into a new project called DNA, which took the technical and editorial expertise behind h2g2 and made it available to the rest of the BBC; this proved so popular that DNA is now used to power all the BBC's message boards. You can find out more about this in my section on DNA.
