By Jimmy Leach

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.

Hence, Rhodri Marsden may blog about techy stuff mostly, but the way the blogs are now constructed means he may feel a little more able to talk about football, or Catherine Townsend may talk about property prices. You get the idea –no-one who writes on the blogs need feel restricted about the subject and the navigation across the Independent Minds site is based on tagging as on any pre-set thoughts about a writer’s subject.

But this is mere tinkering to the major new aspect of the Independent Minds – and that’s that you too can become bloggers on this site. Just register (with LiveJournal who are providing the back-end to all this) and you can add your voice to the others on this site and share your thoughts with the huge and growing audience the site has. You do have to register, I'm afraid - some may find it a pain, but its mean't to be a community, not a free-for-all. We won't be using your data to spam you with offers from the Independent, you can be sure of that.

Letting all and sundry blog under our flag and letting them speak about what they want might be something we regret on occasion– but we trust you. You’re Independent readers after all, you’ll want to debate, not start a fight, and, as the whole thing beds in, we’ll be bringing the user content closer and closer to the centre of the site.

Secretly, you see, we don’t think journalists always know more than the readers. We’re looking to you to prove it. And besides – if it gets unpalatable in there, we reserve the right to delete it, as ever.

This is just the start of the project – we’ll be looking for more and more ways to improve it, to link it better to the ‘main site’ and for ways to encourage users to make the best of it. Over the next weeks and months we’ll roll out improvements and changes, and we hope you’ll contribute to that process. Add your comments to this blog post, and others in the future, and make your suggestions as to how we and the guys at Live Journal can improve Independent Minds. It’s a forum for your voices, after all.

So get writing!