Last week, Lance Knobel noted that you
can’t find the FT’s blogs at blogs.ft.com:
that’s the home of just one blog, Martin Wolf’s economists’ forum. Instead,
the official FT blogs page is www.ft.com/comment/blogs,
which points to eight different blogs including the economists’ forum. The problem
is that the FT has many more than eight blogs. For starters there’s the flagship
Alphaville blog, which is basically
the FT’s version of the NYT’s DealBook. And then there are new blogs, too. Tim
Harford started blogging at the FT
last week, and now Willem Buiter is
blogging there too. Neither are listed on the official FT blogs page, although
both have a blogs.ft.com URL – which is more than Alphaville does.
The whole thing is a cobbled-together mess, with inconsistent URLs, atrocious
navigation, hard-to-find (and often mercilessly truncated) RSS feeds, and a
search function which seems to ignore all the blogs completely. It’s also impossible
to tell, from reading any of these blogs or pages, whether or not doing so counts
towards your precious 30-a-month quota of FT stories, after which the website
reckons you’ve had enough free content, sonny, and you’d better start paying.
How this is meant to help position FT.com as an easy-to-use and authoritative
resource for news and commentary is anybody’s guess, but for the time being
I can pretty much guarantee that more people will get to Buiter’s blog via this
entry on portfolio.com than will ever get to it by visiting FT.com directly.