Tag Archives: technology blog

Guardian blogs complete move to new technology platform

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.

NYTimes blog to be published in print

A local news blog launched by NYTimes.com in June could be given its own space in the Times’ print edition.

While stories from the City Room blog are often aggregated by the paper’s Metro section, the blog’s editor Patrick LaForge said content from the blog may be published in its own right in a bid to drive readers from print to online.

“There are a lot of people who read the print section who just aren’t aware of how much is available on the Web,” LaForge told the New York Observer in an article.

“A lot of that stuff doesn’t get in the paper. So how can we tell readers, ‘Hey, you might want to go check some of this out’?”

While NYTimes.com’s political blog The Caucus and technology blog Bits already feature as columns in the paper’s print offering, LaForge stressed that plans to put the City Room in print were ‘preliminary’ at this stage.