Charles on... anything that comes along

Martin Belam, who has been slowly working through the websites of all the daily papers, reaches the point where he has to ask the question “how Web 2.0 is The Independent?“. (I suspect that the sentence wouldn’t ever parse anywhere outside the deputy’s editor office; I suspect Ian Birrell understands it pretty well).

The Independent though, has chosen not to configure three distinct blogs, but instead the mutually exclusive topics are set up as three categories on one blog.

The content is the most stale of the newspaper blogs I have written about. At the time of review, so far in 2007, on the three topics, there has been the grand total of two posts. The first of these (on March 22nd) starts with an apology for not updating frequently. The author’s next post is a mere 15 days later.

He might have been on holiday. Except there are three of them aren’t there?

On the assumption that to have more than one author on their blog they have picked the Pro Typepad pricing option, it looks like The Indpependent’s total investment in blogging is something like £8 per month.

That’s about the amount that I spend per month. Jings.

(You can see what he has to say about the Web 2.0-ness of The Guardian. In short, it’s ‘could be more consistent and do better’, which is hard to argue with. I think having comments on stories would be wonderful – it’s almost galling that the Mail, Telegraph and even Express do comments on stories. Then again, you get to see their readers and..eyow!). It’s one of those ‘first mover gets early tools’ problems.)

Meanwhile, just to show that the Indie also has some trouble with Newspaper 1.5, I hear that in its wonderful new leap sideways, from Mac OS9 to Windows XP*, it forgot the little matter of the scanners. The scanners take photos from all over and get them into a form that can be used in the paper. They’re essential. Without them you’d have big white spaces, rather like those NGA strikes (if you know what NGA stands for, you’re definitely Hack 1.0; if you know what they did then you’re Hack 0.5.. sigh).

In planning the move to XP, nobody looked at the question of whether the scanners would be able to work with XP. Or how stuff would be channeled into the system. Too late they discovered it would be a problem. So now there will be one lone Mac incorporated in the XP system desperately trying to funnel all the scanners’ output (still on Macs, I hear) through to the Windows system.

Well, they could run the ‘WHITEWASH’ front page again if things don’t pan out.

[OK, that’s enough on the Indie – blog ed.]

* the machines it buys will almost certainly count in Microsoft’s statistics as more successful Vista sales. Read why at The Inquirer. (Ta John Naughton for the link.)