Yesterday I said in passing that I thought that it may now be possible to deliver relatively easily much of the value added by subscription services designed to help organisations “get to grips” with the published commentary - based on the insight that the supply of news and comment is no longer an expensive commodity. I have had a go myself today, and this article is to introduce the results.

I said (in the context of Editorial Intelligence’s “Power of the Commentariat” Report):

Editorial Intelligence’s service was quoted as an example of a site helping people get to grips with online comment. I disagree - it is expensively paid for and therefore helps maintain an “in-crowd”.

I’m wondering if the Editorial Intelligence Model is now way past it’s sell by date - given that summaries of most of the stuff written by commentators and columnists is now syndicated via RSS. I wonder whether MySociety could build us something better for the whole world - not just those who can afford the subscriptions - to use if someone gave them £5k and a month.

Once I saw this morning that the domain commentariat.org.uk was available, I couldn’t resist having a go at a couple of aspects of this opportunity myself - just to see what could be done in a few hours.

At the moment I am providing these facilities:

• The brief summaries of each article or story made available for syndication on other sites.
• Search across all these summaries.
• Categorisation by author, feed and media organisation.
• Direct links to the original stories.
• A tag cloud.
• Archives navigable by date.
• Regular updates.

This is based on a sample of around 30 RSS feeds, and is therefore a strictly limited trial. A more comprehensive service would need to monitor perhaps 400-500 feeds and would take some investment (perhaps £100 a year on a better hosting service than I use at present).

The site is not intended to be a discussion site - in accordance with the Code of Practice I published last summer, it is better thought of as a combined “contents list” and “index” which exists to help visitors find out what has been published, and then to drive traffic to the original articles.

I’m not sure where this is going (there are dozens of other things that can be done quite easily), but I would welcome any comments you might have.

Later on I will publish an article looking at the possibilities for “alternatives” to other expensive services offered by “editorial guidance” companies.

Go and visit “Commentariat: Dispatches from the Glass Bubble“.