New West has a newly redesigned homepage.

They continue to do a nice job blurring the boundaries between newsroom journalism and web2.0 formats like blogs and user-generated content. The latest version is more consciously built around aggregation — of their own stories, and of user comments and contributions — blended nicely together and presented seamlessly.

It also includes a very nicely done custom headline roll powered by Newsgator that is very intuitive and never mentions the letters RSS. I’ve embedded Courtney’s full tour below UPDATE: not embedded ’cause it breaks my blog - go see it here.

While admittedly I’m not unbiased, I think New West is doing a great job pushing the medium in ways that leverage but take the geekiness out of the technologies we’re all convinced will transform mainstream media. Plenty of other newspapers and online media outlets could learn a thing or two from them.

Congrats to all my friends at New West! Readers, if you’ve never visited, check them out.

One of the fun things about the MyBlogLog reporting dashboard is how easy it is to monitor referring search terms, and how unexpected some of them are. Here are some that represent the range, as well as a few of the more interesting or amusing ones that have caught my eye over the past year. I’ve skipped the obvious ones (Yahoo, my name, etc.).
While many of them are not especially popular in terms of number of referrals, some are shockingly well ranked (including the last two, for which I rank #4 and #6 on Google, respectively).

• refurbished vw beetles
• gtd outlook
• craigslist mexico city
• mark cuban
• vw transmission fail (heh!)
• hyper local communities
• i hate good-byes. i know what i need. i need more hellos.
• point setting on ghia
• gambling vs. insurance
• “farecast” “revenue”
• underwear shoot 2007
• “the world is scary”
• prefab modernism
• widget trends
• linkedin “people you may know” (this is a popular one)
• “why i love new york”
• custom show tractor trailers
• belle and sebastian live at hollywood bowl
• visualizing data journalism
• fairmont sucks (heh!)
• loans that change lives
• is indeed.com illegal
• “my wife thinks you [sic]
• “install propane”
• car+ problem
• new york subway turnstyle
• mexico
• california+ redwoods
• bigfoot vs.
• joel spolsky scientologist
• guy kawasaki 10 rules
• “the wire” “politics”
• cookie+ puss
• writa [sic] a poem
• meaning greetings to the new brunette
• how to build valet stand
• youtube pie fight
• music insults
• decadent societies

What can I say about this? I have a master’s degree in Victorian literature and spent a good portion of my career in the book publishing business, surrounded by book fetishists and aficionados of all imprimaturs. I maintain a healthy appreciation for these things myself.

But never could I have imagined a more gleeful “I told you so” for all the world-is-ending / death-of-the-written-word types than this: June Issue Of Business 2.0 Deleted Before Going To Print.

Sorry guys!

Wow, enough’s been written about widgets in the last week to fill a year’s worth of predictions. Fred is for them (subject to user happiness); Nick is apparently against them; and the New York Times just got around to discovering them.

Clearly they’re already the focus of some investor thinking and attention (Yahoo! corp dev folks are even talking about them publicly), and Newsweek has called 2007 the Year of the Widget, so it would be superfluous to call this a prediction from here. But I do think this ties into a broader trend that’s of interest, and that the market may resolve itself in unexpected ways.

This trend is about data visualization, presentation, syndication, and control. After all, publisher widgets are basically just websites - really small websites. And desktop widgets are client apps with small windows. (Though I don’t think client web apps are the future, given that there’s already a very effective client app called a “browser” on most pc’s today that do everything a widget client could do.)

What we’re seeing in the explosion of activity around widgets and embedded apps on MySpace is really the convergence of several trends that I think will all be (or continue to be) important this year: The portability of data streams, and the corresponding ability to aggregate them from around the web, apply rules to them, and ultimately control them at the consumer level. This broad trend leads to:

• New ways of visualizing data streams, especially as led by widgets right now. I’m also including “widgety” experienes like Netvibes here - but this is just a small part of a much bigger trend, as are Ambient devices and RSS-enabled rabbits. To build on the above comment about really small web pages, widget carriages are ultimately just like blog templates - rich presentation layers into which you pump your choice of content. People have lots of data available and will need lots of ways to view it.
• Social transparency and syndication. I can choose what content I expose in “publishery” applications, and I am almost automatically “publishery” in my social applications and digital self-expression because my friends can consume and subscribe to my stuff in reader-like ways. I have increasing ability to apply degree-based rules to this publication (let my friends but not my contacts see data, etc.).
• Data and content pushing upstream into communications. Aren’t IM windows and “you’ve got mail” pop-ups just desktop widgets? I can already subscribe to RSS alerts in IM and integrate messaging at the user & data level into my Yahoo! email in a way that provides a rich, seamless experience. I already consume my RSS feeds into my Outlook client (via Newsgator). There will be much more of this.
• On a related note, presence. That tv commercial where the guy’s watching a show on his laptop, big screen, and mobile window will happen for internet apps and presence-based communications first.
• Information control and data productivity. New apps and platforms are emerging to let users apply these trends to each other. Wesabe lets users do something interesting and valuable by combining a feed of their personal financial data and a social pool of user-generated content about merchants and transaction types, with a high level of security and control. Touchstone is about creating a high degree of control and intelligent automation over how communication and presence data are presented and consumed. These are platforms that allow user data mashups, and you don’t have to be a developer to leverage their power.
• I will probably post at greater length about the specific problem of productivity and Getting Things Done, but the kernel of the idea is, more and more of our communications are digital, more and more of our “to do’s” live in emails and IMs, and more and more important actions and decisions in our lives can be driven off of open-standards-based data and content (like digital wallets. . . or automatic mortgage re-fis). Managing personal and business productivity against all this data is thus more and more of a challenge - and a huge business opportunity. We’ll see how far Microsoft moves the ball forward with Vista - my bet is I still won’t be able to get my RSS, email, calendar, and to-do list to play perfectly with each other even in the same application, let alone across windows.
• That also touches on the issue of synchronization. Much has been said lately about web-based apps vs. client apps. It’s kind of a no-brainer to me that we need the power of the real-time web in all of our business applications now; lightning-fast access to our document data; access to our data via all our windows, even when we’re offline; automatic synching of docs modified offline; and always-safe, always-secure automatic backup of our precious data to the co-lo of our choice, be that an internet cloud or an expensive box in the basement. What’s so hard about that?
• Smart systems. By the way, I really don’t want to have to spend weekends at a time reorganizing my digital photo collection and figuring out 1,001 Lifehacker iTunes hacks.
• Oh, did I mention search? Hehehe.

Quite a few folks around the blogosphere are pointing to the troubles of Backfence.com as a nasty bellwether for local community journalism. I’ve left my response on PaidContent, but here’s the text of it:

As someone who has studied this space closely (I was the lead business and product person during the first year of New West and currently lead “long tail” publisher strategy for Yahoo! Publisher Network), I would like to point out that “local news, community and citizen journalism ventures as a business” are alive and well.

As anyone who’s successfully built a community-based company will tell you, it’s authentic community cultivation first, features second—and those features should be highly driven by the desires and quirks of the community—and marketing third . There are plenty more features del.icio.us users want, and that Upcoming.org have steadily rolled out, just to name two examples (one of which is highly local), yet these communities were successfully growing from day one.

In the community journalism space specifically, I would point to Metroblogging (http://www.metroblogging.com/) and New West (http://www.newwest.net) as two companies with somewhat different approaches that are both doing swimmingly. Metroblogging is in over 50 cities internationally, Comscore is tracking respectable enterprise traffic growth, their organic search engine ranking is terrific, and they’ve been on the front lines of breaking or monitoring some hugely important stories such as Hurricane Katrina. My own alma mater New West, while I’m admittedly not objective, continues to raise the bar for the quality and comprehensiveness of online-only local journalism (having won several online journalism awards), continues to develop recognition and loyalty as a community hub within its regional footprint, and, though it has not thus far positioned itself as a venture-scale business, is as far as I know tracking handsomely as a business.

As for Backfence, nobody I know is surprised by their failure to take root given their “if you build it, they will come” approach, their tackling of the three needs above in reverse order, and their business decision to take venture capital to franchise and expand a model they had never proved and were ultimately unable to make work even in a single flagship location. Bayosphere’s failure as a business was equally unsurprising given its failure as a community (not to mention horrible name and design); for all Dan Gillmore’s [sic] evangelism of the abstract opportunity, he was never able to deliver any compelling value-added to San Franscisco’s already-quite-robust online life.

I do anticipate new models will continue to evolve, and I hope the right kind of aggregation will be part of that, but it’s hard to imagine aggregation without some form of social curation. My guess is that will come from the most cohesive, engaged, organic local communities - and my hope is that the startup universe and the folks who track it will continue to encourage these.

With all the talk about the merging of personal publishing and media consumption, I am reminded of a few lines of doggerel an English poetry professor once shared with my very literary theory-weary class:

Do ya wanna know the creda’
Of Jacques Derrida?

There is no writa’
And there ain’t no reada’
Eitha’

I’m very excited about this morning’s announcement that Yahoo! has acquired MyBlogLog.

As a beta user of the reader roll and an instant fan of the analytics, I’ve been hooked on MyBlogLog since I started using it and immediately became an internal proponent of this deal, which has been a treat to watch move forward. I’ve also had the pleasure of getting to know the team really well - in fact, Eric Marcoullier and I first got in touch via the “welcome” email he sent, to my personal address, when I signed up. Congratulations Scott, Eric, Todd, John, Steve, and the rest of the MBL team - I’m delighted for you and look forward to working together at Yahoo!

The deal also afforded me a chance to watch some of Yahoo’s thought leaders in action - Chad, Bradley, and Jeremy were the key ones who made this happen, though I was delighted to see how many folks at Yahoo! got it so quickly and made the wheels turn so smoothly. There were other suitors for investment (and a veritable swarm of interest at the Web2.0 conference); even though this is an early-stage company, it’s great that Yahoo! collectively recognized how good a fit this is for our community and publisher services offerings and figured out a plan to preserve this burgeoning community while bringing it into the Yahoo! fold.

I’ve also had a front row seat watching the pros in our corporate development department do their thing. Fascinating - and a very interesting perspective on the value of startups and VC in corporate innovation.

There are a lot of reasons why I think this is cool for users and great for Yahoo! Among other things, it’s a nice little tool for distributed aggregation on the community front. (My more official post on the subject will appear over here shortly.) The MyBlogLog team seems pretty excited about it too; here’s their announcement.

UPDATE: Lots of additional coverage:

• Forbes CES blog
• GigaOM
• TechCrunch
• Yahoo! Developer Network Blog
• And plenty more. . .

Cross-posted from Auction for Change

This is fantastic - a local paper in Scotland is using a MySpace page to connect with its readers and aggregate hyper-local news.  I don’t think MySpace is ultimately the right content medium for this - it’s personal and connected in the right ways, but its culture is distinctly different from the kinds of real-news environments that hybrid models like the one I helped kick off at New West are developing.  Nonetheless, a nice little tidbit of validation that the social web is reinventing not just news and classifieds, but that unique space, local news.

In one of the most entertaining viral-video web memes I’ve seen in a while, the band OK Go has nailed the ironic indy-culture meets backyard DIY aesthetic in a video called “A Million Ways”. In it, the four band members dance a well-choreographed but hilariously low-quality set piece (watch it here) whose popularity has inspired imitation across the nation.

But the twist is, now a contest for user-uploaded imitations has videos pouring in from high-school talent-show entrants, college fraternities, and other american idol rejects far and wide. My favorite so far is a surprise black-tie wedding performance, with the father of the bride as the dance troupe leader.

What’s so interesting to me about this goes beyond the simple idea that web2.0 makes everyone an amateur publisher. People are forming social identies and new kinds of community relationships on the web. Watching the wedding video, I laughed along as if I were at an extended-family skit comedy contest - I am a voyeur/participant, in on the joke.

New applications like the dating site engage.com (which gets individuals to participate as matchmakers in the online dating process and is funded by half.com founder Josh Kopelman among others), mybloglog.com (which manages the “recent readers” badge off to the right), and swaptree (which i’m watching with great interest) are moving beyond myspace and spinner rims for your blog, and instead fashioning innovative experiences and fantastic new opportunities for user-to-user relationships.