Salon.com. This is a pretty interesting development. Salon of course is a web based magazine and I think theres a couple of things going on here. Firstly, Salon is pretty switched on and I think they recognise the inclusiveness and brand loyalty that forward thinking blog hosting will bring. Secondly, Salon needs money and visitors badly and recognising that hosted weblogs will drive traffic to their site. It’s also interesting for a third reason, because they’re hosting blogs by getting people to download Radio software, which is superb, desktop based blog creation software (although not with the flexibility of the linux hosted movable type).
This should open a swathe of salon readers creating blogs and a convenient place to find them. A pretty savvy move, I reckon. Of course, Salon isn’t the first traditional media to supplement it’s output – the Guardian springs to mind, but I’m pretty sure Salon are the only ones to host and encourage user blogs…
UPDATE: Two interesting articles on this – Dave Winer, CEO of Userland talks about the deal, and another article that’s well thought out