The Observer newspaper in the UK will launch a blog this coming Sunday.
Journalist, writer and cigar aficionado Ben Hammersley reports:
Sparklines! Folksonomies! Tagging! XHTML Compliant! Accessible! Contemporania! It’s not officially live until next Sunday, and is slightly broken and unfinished in places, but seeing as it’s you, you can have a look at my latest baby, The Observer Blog.
It’s the official blog of The Observer – basically, for you Stateside types, the Sunday paper from the people who also bring you The Guardian. Rafael Behr has been appointed the official blogger-at-large, and has a free rein to post as he pleases. In the US, newspapers have ombudsmen and reader’s editors. At The Observer, we’ve got a readers’ editor, and a blogger with no restrictions, a new powerbook, and a mission to cause trouble. This is new.
For my part, I built the thing.
“A mission to cause trouble” – big expectations!
The Guardian is still the only UK national newspaper with any kind of blog. A long way to go to match what leading newspapers in France are doing with blogs. Or the depth of reader engagement by some US newspapers.
Just a matter of time, I’d say.
Where’s the sparklines? And why is tagging and folksonomies not the same?
Jacob, I’m still trying the understand that as well…
According to Wikipedia, a folksonomy is “a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords” –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy
Wikipedia then says a tag is “the process of labelling a piece of data with metadata” –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagging
So as I understand it, folksonomies relate to the ability to share your tags, as opposed to just tagging a blog post (say) – all that does is give it a category: it doesn’t enable you to share it.
But I’m not sure that what I’ve said here actually makes it any clearer 🙂