Bloggers! Your Guardian wants you...

Map, apparently of internet blogging; the sort of thing we want. Photograph: Science Photo Library

Two futures have emerged in the digital newspaper business. You know where Rupert Murdoch is: with the closed paywall model, in which readers pay and the readership is restricted. That replicates the traditional newspaper model, where editorial control comes from the top down, where the content is produced by a narrow group of professionals and the readership is similarly elitist (it's hard to imagine millions of online newspaper sign-ups).

It'll be no surprise, though, to hear that the Guardian takes a different view. The open approach means there are no barriers for readers, which encourages mass audiences – in the Guardian's case nearly 2.5m uniques a day. It also demands a more collaborative approach to journalism. We like to think we can write a news story or two – but there's a lot of sharp, informed writing out there, often from experts for whom writing is a adjunct to their main source of income.

Already, the Guardian partners with environmental bloggers and writers, and we're keen to do the same in media and in technology. There are a range of possibilities. One is a non-commercial content-sharing arrangement, swapping, say, one or two stories a week. A partner blog runs independently, but the Guardian has the right to republish on guardian.co.uk chosen articles on our site up to the swap limit. Bloggers can republish the same number of Guardian articles in return.

The advantage to bloggers is that their sites gains reach, although not revenue, and your content pops up on the Guardian's site. That'll help out with Google search and rankings – and we all need that these days. Check out the home page of the Guardian Environment Network for an example of how it might work.

There's a second more commercial possibility, where the Guardian (acting in the fashion of an ad network like Glam Media) maybe able to sell advertising for bloggers' sites. Again, blog sites continue to host themselves and retain editorial control. However, by forming a network, each site is able to achieve higher advertising rates than they would alone. Anybody who has relied on Google Ad Sense for income will know exactly how disappointing selling ads that way can be.

Nevertheless, this won't be for everybody. Prospective partners need healthy traffic (five figures at least) and, ideally, some demographic information. It's not possible to make any promises about revenue; advertising income is about as hard to predict as the weather. We'll need a group of sites to get going. But it can be done – check out the Green Ad Network for a similar scheme.

There may be other possibilities in the future. We may also be able to host some bloggers on the guardian.co.uk site, with income being generated through an advertising revenue share. But that is for the future.

My guess is that if you are still reading, you are still interested. If you want to get be part of the Guardian blogs network, drop me a line, with a link to the site, some details about who you are and what you do, and some traffic information. We don't want to discourage sites from any country at this point either – although there may well turn out to be practical limitations.

After that, we'll take it from there – we can't promise to sign up every media or technology blog site. But if you're out there, we'd love to hear from you. Get in touch with me by email at media@guardian.co.uk.

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