Today, we’re announcing a further step forward in our partnership with LiveJournal.

We recently collaborated to create Independent Minds a new comment and opinion platform designed to bring Independent journalists and readers closer together.  Independent Minds combines the best practices of stand-alone blogs with the strong community of Independent readers atop a long-established publishing platform.

And from today, our commenting functionality will also be a part of the Independent Minds platform. We’ll be opening almost all our site to comment (previously, it’s just been opinion and sport) so that you can comment on articles from The Independent. You can reply to comments made by other users and maintain threaded discussions about any Independent article you have an opinion about. If you’re wondering, we’ll be keeping commenting off crime pieces (or legal reasons) and, for the moment, Middle East stories, where the exchange (on the old platform) was a little too robust for us.

In short, it’s all just a little different than before. In exchange for registration, you comment on our content and can create your own. It’s a simple deal and we won’t use your data to spam you with special offers from us or anyone else.

This is on top, of course of Independent Minds as a blogging platform where journalists discuss their stories, share behind-the-scenes insights, and engage directly with Independent readers.  Independent readers with an opinion about a story or feedback for a specific journalist, now have the means to comment immediately and, best of all,  become bloggers themselves.  Once you have registered you can blog about whatever takes your fancy. Post your thoughts, share them with friends and engage in discussions on the topics that matter to you.

Get involved.

This advice is posted elsewhere on this site, but just to try and make sure that some people see it, here's a swift user guide to using blogs on this platform.... You can now gasp in amazement at my cut and pasting:


 

It’s an exciting day at The Independent with the launch of Independent Minds, our new comment and opinion platform for Independent journalists  – and users.
 

Regular readers will have noticed that our blogs by the likes of Andrew Buncombe, John Rentoul and more of the finest journalists around are now found on a shiny new blog, with new designs that are, hopefully, a little easier on the eye than the old ones (thanks to our new partners LiveJournal).
 

There’s a new emphasis on the blogs on the cult of the individual, so while there are  a few hangovers from the navigational branding from the old blogs – the likes of Today in Politics was too good to be killed – you’ll find more single-authored blogs than communities. The idea is to centre more on the writer than on the topic.