Comment is Free and Travel Auctions
You wait around for weeks and weeks, and then two big launches come along at once.
Emily trailed Comment is Free on Saturday — today’s paper describes it as “the first rolling comment blog hosted by a UK newspaper”. It’s driven by the blogging phenomenon — increased interaction demanded by informed and opinionated people — and taken some inspiration from Huffington Post. Arianna Huffington writes today about this shift, and Rupert Murdoch has just spoken about it (again), too. Others in the Guardian Unlimited blogosphere have more to say.
CiF (as we’ve reduced it in numerous e-mails) is a fantastic collaboration between an awful lot of incredibly creative and imaginative people: our developers and systems people marrying Moveable Type with our own CMS, Ben Hammersley working on the MT side, our writers, editors, and commercial people lining up the cast of contributors and advertisers, and our designers taking all that and making it a thing of beauty.
It’ll evolve. There will be a few rough edges smoothed in the coming weeks. Things we think today will be great will turn out to be not so great. Things we think today are minor will be found to be wildly compelling.
But just as the exciting start-up work winds down, so the day-to-day work begins. CiF’s editor, Georgina Henry, is going to find herself at the centre of… well, we’ll just have to see.
And if all that’s too much for you, why not book yourself a cheap holiday somewhere exotic? Our Travel Auction site has launched today, too. Wherever you go, it’s probably got wireless access, so you can still keep in touch with the all the important things in life.
