Web £2.0

The newspaper industry is in a rare old tizzy at the moment. As the Evening Standard chucks caution to the wind and goes free, desperately hoping that coating London in a sodden blanket of gratis copies will give advertisers the chronic horn, Rupert Murdoch has kangeroo-hopped in the other direction. Old lizard-face apparently blames the internet for the modern expectation of news being on tap for free (as opposed to, for example, his decades of competition-slaying price wars) and will soon be charging for his paper's websites.

As the mack daddy of modern media mogulling he can, of course, do what he wants. Good luck to him, although I wouldn't pay a penny for any of his sites. But what if my beloved guardian.co.uk wanted a piece of my pie?

To say I love the Guardian website is an understatement. Tooling around its endless nooks and crannies is the purest form of addictive contentment. At some point in the last few years I've convinced myself that eating pomegranate daily is crucial to my short and long term health, to the point where if I miss a day I start to feel genuinely uneasy. The same goes for my mental health and the Guardian site. To put it another way, if I ever end up in a Tom Hanks/Cast Away situation on a desert island, all that will remain of me (aside from a half-eaten basketball) will be crude images of the site's masthead daubed in blood and tears on all the palm trees.

As befits a newspaper group run by milquetoast liberals, the paper doesn't actually make money. Once the hessian office windfarm and free copies of the Female Eunuch for the cleaners have been paid for they'll need to find some dosh from somewhere, and I imagine at some point it will be the site. So fine - just tell me where to send the blank cheque. If anything, it might weed out some of the more tedious Comment Is Free contributors who pop up under the blogs, endlessly whinging and slagging each other off (whilst getting hysterical if anyone slags them off in return). A typical exchange is:

Shithawk1976: Oh God, another Guardian blog about Big Brother? I've never seen it. I thought this was supposed to be be a quality paper???!?!!!

Sir Gavin of Burpsalot: IF YOU DON'T LIEK IT WHY BOTHER COMMENTING??

Shithawk1976: I'll comment where I want to. And the low brow nature of your reply has only confirmed my prejudices about all reality TV and the sliding standards at the Guardian. Good day.

Sir Gavin of Burpsalot: this comment has been removed by a moderator