Guardian.co.uk is in the process of moving the rest of its blogs to its new R2 platform, an update from the title’s own insider blog reports.

From tomorrow the site’s remaining 23 blogs will join the first phase of blogs, which made the switch last month, and will sport a new design and improved tools for commenting.

Titles making the change tomorrow include the technology blog, arts blog and PDA, which says comments will be turned off on the moving blogs between 4pm and 9pm (BST).

The key features of the new blog design are:

• Keywords linking blog posts to related content across the site
• The relocation of blogs to their relevant sections – e.g. the politics blog in the politics channel
• Blogs now share features introduced across the rest of the redesigned site, including the option to share posts by Digg, del.icio.us etc, and a widget showing the most-linked to Guardian content
• Blog posts are included in the site’s search
• Commenters can have their own user profiles

As previously reported on this blog, the new features were trialled on the site’s Comment Is Free platform and use social media firm Pluck’s commenting technology.

Analysis of the upgrade is already coming in: Shiny Media co-founder Ashley Norris says the move ‘signals the end of the organisation using a traditional blogging approach’.

The new design, says Norris, gives readers only a brief view of the intro to a blog post on a section homepage.

“To read the story users have to click through to the page. The reason the Guardian has done this is that being less generous means more click throughs, more page views per users and subsequently more ad impressions served,” he points out.

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The Guardian is moving its blogs onto its new platform, bringing them in line with the rest of the recently redesigned site.

The move will be completed in two stages starting with 14 titles, including its Lost in Showbiz and news blogs, an announcement on the Inside Guardian blog said. The remaining sites will move over next month.

Once switched the blogs will boast new colours and design features (see the right-hand screenshot below), including improved navigation and links to the rest of Guardian.co.uk.

Keywords linking blog posts to related content across the site will be added – a feature previously unavailable on the blogs platform.

Blogs will also be relocated to their sections – e.g. the politics blog in the politics channel – rather than housed in a separate blogs section.

The new blogs will also share features introduced across the rest of the redesigned site, including the option to share posts by Digg, del.icio.us etc, and a widget showing the most-linked to Guardian content.

Blog posts will now also be included in the site’s search.

Changes to the commenting function on the site’s blogs have also been made – the biggest change being the introduction of user profiles.

“For a long time, we and many other sites operated a content-driven model which meant that user comments were only associated with – and displayed alongside – a particular content item. The creation of user profiles reveals our growing community-driven approach, recognising that just as every guardian.co.uk author gets a contributor page in which their contributions are archived so that their participation can be explored across topics and over time, so should our users,” said Meg Pickard, head of communities and user experience for Guardian.co.uk, in a blog post

Additional features will be added to user profiles over time, added Pickard, and experiments with the layout of comments beneath blog posts are ongoing.

Basic formatting, such as creating block quotes and links, is also now possible on blog post comments.

The new features have previously been trialled on the site’s Comment Is Free platform and use social media firm Pluck’s commenting technology.

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Social media firm Pluck has developed a new version of its SiteLife platform – the technology currently employed by Hearst Digital and USA Today to ramp up interactive features for users.

According to a press release, the new version (3.3) offers improved search engine optimisation to make content such as comments on news articles and forums more open to search engines.

It also gives more options for publishers when managing online communities.

Pluck’s technology, which handles user comments, ratings, recommendations, image and video sharing, forums, blogs and creates social network-style profiles for users, was recently implemented by the Guardian’s Comment is Free section.

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The Guardian is asking users to contribute topics for discussion on Comment is Free (CiF) through the site’s blog.

Submissions can also be made via CiF’s Twitter account.

The section recently implemented technology from social media firm Pluck to increase interaction and user engagement features on CiF.

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Social media firm Pluck will supply technology to Hearst Digital’s uber-web portal Allaboutyou.com

It will provided blogs, discussion tools and media-sharing applications to the new community site for women, which combines content from six Natmag’s UK tiles.

The move is part of an ‘aggressive’ push of the business, says the Guardian.

For Hearst, it’s the second major partnership for its magazine websites after securing the services of Brightcove to supply its digital video hosting.

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The Guardian is working on a project to monitor user interaction with their website more closely.

This ‘attention data’ will then be reflected in content and community areas of the site, Tom Turcan, general manager and head of digital media development at the Guardian, told Journalism.co.uk.

Turcan would not be drawn on specifics of the plan, but said the project would involve social media firm Pluck – whose SiteLife technology is to be introduced to the community areas of Guardian.co.uk later this year.

“The principle of tracking how people use things and then reflecting it back on the site is a way to build community,” he said.

Most recommended/most e-mailed lists are basic examples of how the analysis may be used, said Turcan, but emphasis will be placed on representing ‘crowd wisdom’ in a ‘bespoke’ form.

Turcan was speaking on a panel discussing news on social networks, during which he announced the following figures for Guardian.co.uk (they are all per month):

• 2 million podcasts downloaded
• 0.5 – 1 million videos viewed
• 2 million RSS clicks
• 50,000 blog posts

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