Comment is free, community is hard
A friend sent a link that I have been meaning to post (sorry — too much time at the beach I guess) to a piece at the Online Journalism Review, which is a great overview of both the successes and the pitfalls of The Guardian’s blog-hub feature called Comment Is Free (which The Guardian has said quite openly was its attempt to create something like the Huffington Post). It’s a fairly long piece, but it’s well worth reading, and it has lots of links to useful discussions elsewhere.
According to the article “Contributors, of who there are now more than 200, are asked to write without remuneration (other than those who are published in the paper), with a £75 fee offered if their contribution is promoted as a pick of the day – a model not disimilar to the BlogBurst model discussed in Stephen Bryant’s piece. The payback for authors would appear to be access to customised publishing tools, and a larger audience than they might have for their own Weblog.”
The Guardian has also been running a contest to find a new blogger: “In May, two months after its launch, Henry announced the Big Blogger contest, to elicit nominations for a commenter to become a regular Comment is Free blogger. This initiative was in response to the feedback that “not only is the debate on most of the threads not as bad as I sometimes make out, but… in many cases is of higher quality than the posts by some ‘professionals’” (Big Blogger: let battle commence, May 23, 2006)”
Among the flaws mentioned are the fact that there is little or no linking in some of the blogs (which makes them a lot more like traditional columns) and that there is a noticeable lag between publication of either content on the blogs or comments, which are moderated: “Although Comment is Free is presented as a Weblog-based service, the posts often don’t follow a basic tenet of Weblogging: linking. This doesn’t significantly undermine the system, though it reinforces the feeling that this is an established newspaper space… Comment is Free also appears to have ignored another tenet of Weblogging: instant publication. According to one author “you do not actually have access to ‘your’ page. You send copy to the editors, who then vet it, edit it and put it online at their own pace. There is no immediacy, and no direct control of your copy. The entire feeling of speaking directly to readers is lost, as it is so heavily mediated, not just by the editing process but the technology itself”.
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