Blogging and 'citizen journalism' has the potential to send website page views into overdrive.

Industry expert Vin Crosbie told a newspaper conference that small circulation papers in America had seen page views double with the introduction of a series of popular daily blogs.

He told an audience of editors and circulations bosses how advertising was now being sold on the back of blogging and examined the possiblilty of it taking off in the UK.

He said: "This is the idea that journalism is not to be handled only by specially-trained individuals.

"We can only imagine how this might go down with the National Union of Journalists, but this is happening for the US and has provided a way to develop loyalty of readership."

He highlighted LJworld.com and Lawrence.com, which have 12 links to weblogs direct from the home pages.

Contributers included the mayor, a sports fan, a street sweeper, a farmer, a student, a 17-year-old girl and a lesbian housewife.

The result is a page view count of 700,000 per month, double the traffic the paper previously achieved.

He said: "People love to read about what other people are doing in their lives.

"The publisher now refers to it as 'their paper' rather than 'our paper'."

The paper has doubled traffic and boosted reader loyalty with the addition of just one extra member of staff. Existing staff writers are now turning their skills to the blog, taking copy which would not normally make a story and adding their own blog about it.