Comment is Free

Does the UK need its own, Guardian-branded, version of the Huffington

Post? The Guardian, for one, certainly seems to think so. Jemma Kiss reported

on Thursday that it will have "more than 200 columnists and expert commentators"

when it launches next

week. Jeff Jarvis has seen

it, but is keeping relatively quiet: he says only that it’s an "oddly

titled new opinion aggregator".

I love the Guardian, I love blogs, so I should, by rights, love Comment Is

Free when it launches. But I’m not yet sure that I’m even going to read it.

For I don’t read HuffPo, I don’t read TPMCafe.

In general, I get overwhelmed when there are too many posts by too many authors.

If there’s a blog that I like and it pops up in my RSS reader with a new entry,

I’ll read it. I’ll also read a good half dozen new entries or more from Gawker

or Curbed: they’re short, and I can whizz

through them quickly. Someone like Jeff Jarvis is more daunting, since his entries

can be very long, but even then it’s relatively easy to click through them and

work out which ones I want to read.

But HuffPo has so many entries, which are so long, that I never (or almost

never) have the time or the energy to find the jewels

hidden therein. Comment Is Free might not have that problem, since every contributor

will have an individual blog with, I assume, its own feed. If Marina Hyde has

her own blog, for instance, I’ll definitely subscribe to that: she’s a natural-born

blogger if there ever was one. It would give her the opportunity to write about

something other than celebrities for a change. And what I wouldn’t give to read

a Nancy Banks-Smith blog (although I’m not holding my breath).

Still, Comment Is Free has to be a great thing, even if Felix doesn’t read

it every day. It makes much more sense to create extra opinion content and put

it on the web in blog format than it does to take existing opinion content and

put it behind a subscriber

firewall. The Guardian is the only newspaper about which I can feel absolutely

comfortable saying that links to stories will never expire, that its archives

will always remain open and searchable and free. I hope that Comment Is Free

will see it taking the next step, which is to fill a major part of its web presence

with outbound

links.