I’ve just chanced upon the new Guardian site Comment is Free as it has hit the ether. Must be brand new as Goog has only one result for it.

Comment is free is a major expansion of Guardian comment and analysis on the web. It is a collective group blog, bringing together regular columnists from the Guardian and Observer newspapers with other writers and commentators representing a wide range of experience and interests. The aim is to host an open-ended space for debate, dispute, argument and agreement and to invite users to comment on everything they read.

The Guardian has already won plenty of awards for its website, and at first peek this new site has raised the bar even higher.

What they have done is technically quite simple, but with tremendous results. All comment and opinion articles are treated as blog posts, tagged with contributor name and also by subject. You can view the “blogs” by contributor (I count 551 of them, each effectively with their own “blog”) or by subject and there are of course, most popular listings etc.

The Grauniad is not strong on law, but even so, Marcel Berlins makes regular, quality contributions in his twice-weekly column, now on his “blog”.

The subject tagging clearly needs more effort as there are precious few tagged “law”.

My only quibble is that they claim this is a blog: it is not, though it could easily move closer to being so. There are only two essential attributes of a blog: a reverse chronology of posts, and a means to browse the archives by date. Bloggers expect these, rely on these; without them you don’t have a blog. Comment is Free displays chronologies, but only of very short extracts and these are insufficient to capture the attention in the way a blog page does; and it does not provide browsing by month. Fix these two things and they will have their blog.