If you thought blogging had already gone mass market before, what do you think of the Telegraph offering free blog hosting? It is technically far ahead of the Guardian’s Comment is Free “blog”. Which always struck me as

(a) not a blog
(b) a mish-mash of variable quality writers.

Interesting to see how it develops and what the Telegraph thinks it will achieve by offering free MyTelegraph branded blogs to the masses. They get traffic, extra advertising revenue and you get a simple and restrictive blog in their gated community. Not sure how appealing that is as a proposition. Probably a place to start. Readers will have to invest a lot of time in finding writers they want to read and the noise to signal ratio will inevitably be high.

Until now the Telegraph’s blogging journalists have not been overwhelmed with comments and although Little and Large seems occasionally interesting, most of the blogs seem dead. (The giveaway is those digg et al voting buttons gathering dust and merely serving to emphasise that nobody diggs them.)

If an amateur citizen journalist blogger on MyTelegraph becomes a hit, how will the journos react? They are not exactly setting a tough standard to beat…