CricInfo adopts blog technology

At Africa's premier online conference, HighwayAfrica, Mark Comerford from Stockholm University emphasizes that blogging is really "just a content management system." For example, to say blogging is journalism is like saying your telephone is journalism. It's really the content and the stories people have to tell that's important here. Technology is just the carrier or enhancer.

- Matthew Buckland, writing on the Poynter Institute's excellent E-Mail Tidbits, 16.9.05

With Mark Comerford's observation in mind, I note that CricInfo yesterday launched a blog called The Surfer. The difference from CricInfo's past attempts, intentional and unintentional, at running blogs, is that this one actually uses blogging software. Movable Type, to be precise.

The Surfer is a revamping of the misleadingly-titled "Best of the Web", and is run by three of the CricInfo editorial crew in London, Mumbai and Brisbane. They promise future blogs, but it's a real pity that this content management system wasn't available to Gideon Haigh for his fascinating Ashes diary (a collection of static pages for which the links had to be, and often weren't, updated manually).

Curiously, the Surfer does not permit comments, even moderated ones. You need to email them - and that certainly isn't a Movable Type limitation!

If the CricInfo blog layout looks remarkably like the Guardian's Newsblog, then it's because they use the same CMS, Movable Type. Perhaps the old Guardian-Wisden nexus of the Cricket Unlimited days is still at work.

CricInfo has had "blogs" before, notably in recent times Amit Varma's 23 Yards. But with the deepest respect to Amit, whose India Uncut is superb, 23 Yards was for all intents and purposes an op-ed column for a major media outlet.

I'm sure the present-day CricInfo operatives have no idea that their organisation was a pioneer of the blogging philosophy almost a decade ago, in two major areas - one of which I'm proud to say was substantially my handiwork. That was "The Googler's Gazette" - now long gone from the CricInfo website - opinion pieces submitted by the punters, with their fellow punters having their say on each article. Alas, the content management system at my disposal for compiling the Googler's was a thing called Notepad.

And that other, more durable, more time-honoured CricInfo blog? The humble ball-by-ball commentary. The CMS, a program called Dougie. Long may it reign.