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Frequent visitors to it will obviously have noticed the redesign of the BBC News home page. It’s basically similar in layout but it has a new style and some new features. According to themselves the redesign now takes into account that most people view the site with at least a screen resolution of 1024×768 so they are making the most of it.

They have also embraced embedded flash videos for some articles which although not a novel feature, it is one that adds a bit of value add as it were to an article. Except it doesn’t work. Well it does work but not for me. When you click on a video it trys to load up an advert first from ad.doubleclick.net. Once the ad has been displayed it then picks up the video that you wanted to watch from the BBC’s own servers. However if like me you block all known advertising sites this becomes a problem because the flash player can’t serve up it’s ad first.

As I’m certainly not going to unblock doubleclick just so I can see a video of George Bush walking into a wall I guess I’m going to have to just read the article instead. It’s a pity that you can’t watch a video without being forced to watch 20 seconds of adverts first.

In keeping with news websites the Irish Examiner have redesigned their breakingnews.ie site. Coincidentally they also provide enbedded flash video clips too.