The Blog Race
The world of mainstream media firm blogging doesn't stand still. Even as more and more national newspapers are moving into the blogging game, The Guardian takes another leap forward with the launch of Comment is Free, a blog which publishes those most contentious of newspaper stories, opinion pieces, and allows the public to comment on them directly. While there is a comment moderation policy in place, according to co-builder of the site Ben Hammersley, this seems to be a brave move by the publishers, raising the chances of something libellous being published in the comments.
Perhaps the most prominent liberal newspaper in the anglophone world, opening a weblog for comment and opinion, with free and open user commenting is, to put it mildly, asking for trouble. Even more so as we come under UK libel law, rather than US. This means that libellous comments left on the site might potentially cost the newspaper a considerable amount of money. No one has ever offered this sort of content to the wider world in this sort of legal, political, or cultural context. This means that we have to employ a whole combination of technological and social countermeasures to make sure that the handful of trolls do not, as they say, ruin it for the rest of us. Frankly, it gives me the fear.
That said, the response doesn't seen overwhelming just yet. Most posts are only picking up comments in the single figures in the first day, although that number does seem to grow over time.
It'll be interesting to see how the experiment pans out.
