Trinity Mirror’s new local site is… a blog.

Posted by Martin Stabe on 30 March 2007 at 13:29
Tags: Buckinghamshire Advertiser, Moveable Type, Trinity Mirror

Trinity Mirror’s Buckinghamshire Advertiser has relaunched its web site.

It’s very cleanly designed. But there’s something significant that is unusual about it — it’s a blog. The front page is three recent stories presented in reverse-chronological order, with each one allowing comments. There’s a list of categories, RSS feeds, and even a tag cloud. Each new upload of a story pings Technorati.

Of course, blogs are defined by their conversational nature rather than their technical capabilities. So more precisely, the Buckinghamshire Advertiser is a newspaper site powered by blog software.

A quick examination of the source code for the site reveals that the content management system powering it is Movable Type, the software produced by Six Apart that also powers the Guardian’s many blogs, not to mentioned thousands of individual bloggers’.

Trinity Mirror has clearly realised that properly customised blogging tools can do everything that a much more expensive content management system would be able to. The web developers and software houses that produce complex, expensive CMSs should take note.