For the last five or so months I’ve been working on a new set of sites under the umbrella of “BBC Earth” — a programme of work aimed at giving everyone access to some of the best natural history content in the world. The project is made up of three complementary and interlinked projects, the first couple of which recently went live.

The first site to go live, “Out of the Wild” aims to bring you a view on the natural world from the perspective of our crews while on location; a sort of “From our correspondent” for the natural world. The stories — a mix of short video clips, slideshows and text based stories — are all grouped around the expeditions, the people on location and the originating programmes. Our hope is that you will enjoy this more personal view of the natural world brought to you from some of the most amazing part of the world by the worlds best wildlife documentaries makers.

We then launched “Earth News” which does pretty much what is says on the tin — news about the natural world.

We’re both aggregating natural history news articles from elsewhere on the BBC news site as well as new articles (some unique) written for Earth News, such as the story of the adult king penguin which kidnapped a skua chick and then attempted to raise it.

The final part of BBC Earth will see us starting to open up the BBC archive in, what I hope, will be interesting and useful ways.

We then, of course, need to make all of this available in nice machine representation so that others can start to hack with the data.