Nominations for New Media Awards 2006

Comment is free is the first collective, group blog set up by a British national newspaper. The aim was to greatly expand the forum for debate not only by opening up all Guardian comment pieces for discussion by readers but by inviting hundreds of other voices to regularly blog about their areas of interest. We now have almost 500 bloggers contributing to the site - a mixture of scientists, academics, politicians, activists, policy-formers, cultural affairs commentators and a host of other writers. Since we launched two months ago we have posted more than 2,000 pieces on the site, which have gathered over 50,000 comments in response from readers. We do not pre-moderate debate, to keep it as open as possible, although we remove offensive material based on reader feed-back. On the technical side, Comment is free also breaks new ground. It is the first major newspaper site to be built, in the UK at least, using the very cutting edge of web techniques. The pages are written in standards-based XHTML, which allows the site to be read by the disabled or the multi-platformed; debate is aided by the hundreds of RSS feeds we publish from the site, and by the innovative tagging and search systems; live events and informed debate are fostered by our podcast feeds; and our site architecture and URL structure is uniquely intelligent, allowing for easy navigation by both humans and search-engine intelligences. The design, both aesthetic and technical, is pointedly purposed to foster debate and civil discourse. Georgina Henry

Comment is free is the first collective, group blog set up by a British newspaper. We now have around 500 bloggers signed up and blogging - the widest range of opinion covered by any website in Britain. Our own columnists are joined by academics, scientists, doctors, environmentalists, activists, politicians, cultural commentators and other writers. We now have people blogging for us from all around the world and are constantly expanding our group. In the two months since we launched we have posted 1300 pieces on the blog in addition to carrying 1000 pieces from the comment pages of the Guardian newspaper. More than 50,000 comments have been posted on the articles. Comment is free has broadened and deepened the debate conducted in the pages of our newspaper, and allowed us to carry a much wider range of opinion. It has also opened up our columnists and contributors to a much larger, worldwide audience and facilitated a much greater level of interaction and debate with our readers. Georgina Henry