Telegraph gets touchy about Comment is free

The Daily Telegraph’s Shane Richmond is unhappy that the Guardian calls Comment is free (Cif) a blog. It’s not, he says, calling for a debate about what exactly a blog is, and adding it’s unfair to compare the Telegraph’s blogs with CiF.

Maybe he’s right. And, personally, I’m delighted he’s talking about CiF on telegraph.co.uk - given it’s Britain’s top newspaper website, we should get lots of extra readers (just kidding).

But Shane assumes we were setting out to create something that would appeal to the kind of people who care about the definition of a blog. We weren’t, and didn’t.

We set out to join and foster online conversations with something that resembled a blog, used blog technology and frequently behaved like a blog. CiF is actually 1200 or so blogs, with an aggregated front end, to allow us to include some crowd-pleasing editorial tricks - like editing - and protect columnists from the kind of dead blog syndrome that so hurts the Telegraph and Indie efforts.

The key difference was we took the focus off individuals and redistributed attention between authors, commenters, and the aggregate discussion. Breaking views and strong user debate are the key influences on CiF’s front page, not the article of faith that is the newest-post-first traditional blog form. We think it improves the user experience.

It was a format based on years of blog experimentation, and frustration, at Guardian Unlimited. In particular, the massively group nature of the blog was deliberate; we built in acceptance of the reality that many interesting people simply don’t have time to contribute very regularly. It’s a reality the Telegraph and pretty much every other blogging newspaper continues to ignore.

The new approach was a gamble. But, happily, real users didn’t bat an eyelid when CiF launched, or when we copied the approach for sport and arts. In fact, they seemed to appreciate the thought, as our stats show, and as our internal research confirms.

So maybe Shane’s right. It’s not a blog - not, at least, in the traditional sense, although I’m going to keep calling it that. But in making the argument, he’s missing the point. Having seen the Telegraph’s blog stats, and their levels of interaction, maybe Shane and his colleagues should join us in “not a blog”-ing as soon as possible. Go on - devise a new format that actually works for your readers, and leave the blog dogma behind.

COMMENTS / 5 COMMENTS

“It’s not a blog - not, at least, in the traditional sense”

But if you’re only going to consider “traditional” blogs, than you would be hard pressed to find an example (even sites that people might think of as “traditional” wouldn’t be). From Dave Winers’ “the history of weblogs”:

“The first weblog was the first website, http://info.cern.ch/, the site built by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. From this page TBL pointed to all the new sites as they came online”

I even vaguely remember a site back in 94 or 95 that was somebody’s “weblog”, as in the chronological list of sites that the person who’s weblog it was had visted (which was a really useful site, back when the web was small and Yahoo was new). I doubt you could find such a “traditional” weblog today.

Scot thought this on Feb 14 07 at 2:46 pm

Scot, the best example of that type I can think of that’s still banging around is Lindsay Marshall’s Bifurcated Rivets
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/bifurcated/rivets/

Now THAT is a log of the web.

Bobbie Johnson thought this on Feb 14 07 at 7:07 pm

Perhaps I should have said the “popularly understood sense”. But you sort of make the point for me: this is an evolving idea (as it should be - it’s only a few years old). Why do people try to nail it down?

Neil Mc thought this on Feb 14 07 at 8:18 pm

“You’re doing it wrong!” - for me, that is usually a sign that you’re in fact getting something right, especially when the refrain comes from a source such as the Telegraph.

John Connell thought this on Feb 15 07 at 8:12 pm