OPEN

The UK’s best-selling newspaper, the Murdoch-owned Sun, has re-designed its website and introduced a load of new-wave web features. But its embrace of Web 2.0 has been selective – and revealing:

• A luvverly bunch of blogs: blogs include political editor Trevor Kavanagh – subtitled “Read the blog the politicians fear” – funny I thought that was Guido Fawkes.
• RSS for news not blogs: strangely, you can get RSS feeds for the news sections on the website but not for the blogs.
• Video all over the shop: Sun TV has news stories on the front page and a wide selection of links to Reuters and Fox News as well as its own “Sun Exclusives” – lead item today on pole-dancing as exercise. Elsewhere there’s Dr Deidre’s video casebook – a kind of soap opera / am dram / agony aunt hybrid.
• Podcasts galore: yep – there’s loads of them. Not sure if you can actually subscribe to them (which will upset the purists) but audio content a-go-go nonetheless.

Oodles of local classified ads: The Sun is using the Oodle classified ads search engine as a local classified ads play and promoting it with its own blog which says the service got 12,000 unique visitors in the first two hours of going live.

So we’ve got a mass-market tabloid that is providing its readers with Web 2.0 style services – will be worth watching to see how it evolves.

: : Note: no sign yet of the MySun MySpace-alike that was talked about last year… a web 2.0 bridge too far for the brand or is it still the pipeline I wonder.