Blogs in the Guardian.

The Guardian seems to be very into the blogging phenomena at the moment. The editor has a blog, they have various "Blogs" covering technology, the news, culture, business and games. Each day on page 2 there is a small section called "Today On The Web" which culls comments from blogs about a newsworthy topic.

It all feels very forced. The "Blogs" don't feel like blogs they feel like a cross between a newspaper column that has been put on line and the spam blogs you find if you click through "next blog" for any length of time on Blogger.

The Today on the Web section is irksome because any fule can do a search on a phrase and come up with 3 to 4 coherent snatches of writing on a subject. It is money for old rope, I could do that and I haven't got a degree in journalism.

They seemed to have missed a trick although I will stand by my argument that blogging is not the new journalism it does have a role whether that be social commentary, in creating an online community such as the trannisphere or communicating with far flung family. In fact I can see the Christmas blog entry will be the round robin letter of 2005 and they are not capturing that.

However I do have to say it isn't all bad as they did mention Becky's Hamster Flickr Sudoku the other day in the online News Blog.

I will put the necessary links in later, I can't right now as I haven't worked out how to copy URLs on this tablet I'm blogging on. The Tablet is Jessica's. Becky and I and Jess of course are staying at Sophie's for the weekend.

Postscript 6 November 2005 have inserted the links.