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So I mentioned the Daily Telegraph a few weeks back as being a media brand looking to become a social network of sorts. Last week Shane Richmond pulled the covers off a prototype off of MyTelegraph…

My Telegraph allows any reader to create their own blog, store all the comments they make on other readers’ blogs and save articles to read later. Version one of the site, which you can see below, will be ready to go live soon.

Trials are already underway apparently and you can see more mock-ups of what the service may look like on the Flickr tag telegraphmediagroup.

While I was on holiday the Economist‘s skunkworks team Project Red Stripe announced that it had completed its canvassing for ideas about new services to develop and was plumping for…

…a social network. It will also feature aspects of other ideas, such as data visualization, mash-ups and, perhaps, some user-generated content. Essentially, we’re bundling several web technologies into an online service that we hope you want to part of.

In a previous post Joanna from the Project Red Stripe team had already said that:

a social network for Economist subscribers is indeed quite obvious. Perhaps even so obvious that it would not be very innovative for Project Red Stripe to create one – since The Economist is likely to soon start integrating all kinds of community features in its website anyway.

She sees an exclusive community like a Small World (aSW) being an option:

the model I envisage would be closer to aSW than MySpace, FaceBook or even LinkedIn. The Economist, because of its issue-focused and critical content is already a platform of common interest for its readers. As “Free Exchange” (a blog on Economist.com) and “Inbox” (where all letters to the editor are published, except for the abusive ones, that is) demonstrate, there is much potential for lively interaction between Economist readers.

Any more newspapers out there looking to go social networking, I wonder? Regular readers will recall that the first trailblazer in this department was of course The Sun with its MySun service – I can’t see any membership numbers on the site but the MySun forums look to be in rude health… 

: : Update: And how could I forget to mention the recently relaunched Daily Express website’s MyEXPRESS…