South Africa’s Mail & Guardian newspaper unveils new all singing, all dancing website

South Africa’s Mail & Guardian newspaper has substantially revamped its website, in the process introducing a series of new features to improve usability.

M&G Online’s general manager Matthew Buckland blogged recently about the use of Thompson Reuters Open Calais semantic tagging technology to organise and cross-reference all the site’s content for the relaunch.

In addition to this the revamp has introduced a number of key features:

Registration and dashboard

  • Like the Guardian in the UK, the new M&G site now allows users to save clippings of favourite articles and story history while browsing.
  • Comment on articles and debate with other readers

New features

  • It has also introduced a topics A-Z: A list of people, places, subjects and organisations covered by the site
  • Added a feature – NewsSwarm – that allows users to see who is viewing which article in real time
  • Integrated articles with Google Maps
  • Make the popular cartoon sections searchable and tagged
  • Added easy exploration of e-commerce areas: jobs, cars, dating, property and shopping
  • Allowed users to view related articles from outside the news website.
  • Added video feeds

Semantic tagging – a key new element

  • Tag clouds of subjects, people and places on the home page and news sections
  • Articles regionally organised and can be viewed by country or city with South African news at town, city or provincial level
  • Articles are also tagged with names of cities, countries, companies or organisations, and people, which can be viewed in the Topics A-Z section

Leave a Reply