All Things Digital

Today, we debut our new redesign of the home screen of AllThingsD.com.

It is, in fact, our second redesign since we launched the site in late April of 2007, although it is a much more drastic redesign, with a lot more elements added.

Why did we do it? No, we are not hyperactive (OK, we are, but we are taking medication for that).

Actually, it is because we in the ATD brain trust (that would be Walt Mossberg and me), along with our many much-more-intelligent staffers and advisers, wanted to bring even more digital news and analysis to our readers by making more stories available on the front page from us and also from around the Web.

Our aim was simple: Now newsier than ever!

In fact, we hope you will find our new look linktastic, as we try hard to embrace the notion that ATD’s audience wants to be able to find great tech and media stories anywhere and everywhere.

Just fyi, the inside sections remain exactly the same–it is only the front page that has undergone the renovation.

Here’s a quick tour, from the top to the bottom of the page:

Megablog: We combined the BoomTown and John Paczkowski’s Digital Daily blogs in one rolling one in the center rail.

We felt that it allowed us to feature a lot more of our stories on the main page longer, up to 20 typically, and also made it easier for readers to find stories before they dropped off the front.

We will be adding more material to this section soon, as we develop our content further.

Walt Mossberg: Walt’s weekly Personal Technology and Mailbox columns and Mossblog, as well as Katherine Boehret’s Mossberg Solution, move up and to the right in a high-profile spot.

As ever, Walt is the site’s amazing anchor and a tech consumer’s greatest adviser, telling it like it is and writing reviews that matter.

Tech Headlines: On the top left, we wanted to bring in the stellar work from our Dow Jones brethren at The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and MarketWatch, as well as from the Dow Jones newswires, to give readers links to as many stories as we can as news breaks.

This section will be updated every nine minutes to keep it fresh and new.

Voices: This section on the left remains the same, except it goes vertical. We try to hand-select (no stinkin’ algorithm for us) from across the digital blogosphere, so we can feature blog posts we think you need to see to keep up.

Also, expect more guest bloggers who write original posts just for ATD, like one tomorrow from Slide’s Keith Rabois, giving BoomTown a hard time for our problem with juvenile widgets.

The Tech Top 10: Also on the left, just below Voices, we keep our edited Tech Top 10, a list of the stories we think you need to know about every day.

Video: On the right is our featured video. We do a lot of video at ATD and we will feature our latest-posted here.

Tech Around the Web: Also on the right, we are posting, via RSS, the feed from four digital news sources we like and think are useful for our audience.

Two are editorially driven sites, paidContent and GigaOm, who we believe are combining the energy of the blogosphere and also providing readers with trusted reporting that also adheres to the standards of accuracy and ethics we try to operate under too.

This is a big focus for us at ATD and we want to point readers to high-quality material. They say you are judged by the company you keep and we could not agree more.

Both Digg and Techmeme, of course, are the key news aggregators of the sector and we like how helpful they are in surfacing important tech and media stories for readers.

Just click on each tab to get to each section. This section will also be constantly refreshed throughout the day.

More ads: Well, we have to pay the bills, don’t we? We hope you do find them useful and don’t find them too intrusive.

There will be even more to come from us in the coming weeks, especially as we gear up for the sixth edition of the D: All Things Digital conference, which is taking place May 27 to 29.

So, please let us know what you think of our new look, as we would love feedback.

And special thanks to all who worked on the redesign, including Mike Monteiro of Mule Design Studio and especially the tireless and multi-talented Adam Tow, our Web genius.

If we were an actual baby, AllThingsD.com would be just about to walk by now.

Hopefully, we have done better than that over the past year and we hope to do even more in the year ahead, attempting to give readers the very best tech news and analysis married with the high standards The Wall Street Journal is known for.

At the same time, we have also tried to capture the excitement and energy of the blogosphere, in what has been an entrepreneurial effort within a major media company.

The site officially launched on April 26, 2007, one year and two days ago.

No presents, but your presence over the next year, as we make even more improvements to our work-in-progress site.

Thanks, of course, go first to my amazing partner, Walt Mossberg, as well as our crack staff (click here to see them in all their glory), partners, designers and all the many Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones folks involved.

To mark the past year, BoomTown could spend a lot of time deeply ruminating on how blogging is so very different than mainstream journalism (much more fun, much less sleep).

Or I could ponder the agonizing quest to improve standards and accuracy in the blogosphere (”I am I, Don Quixote, the lord of La Mancha/Destroyer of evil am I/I will march to the sound of the trumpets of glory/Forever to conquer or die.”)

Or I could discuss widgets and how they have changed my life (I don’t know what I would have done had Scramble not inspired my empty soul!).

But, no!

Instead, I will just re-post here one of the very first posts I had up on that first day, about…drum roll, please…my worries about the situation at Yahoo (YHOO).

I don’t want to say I am a psychic or anything, but in this piece, called “Terry in Turnaround,” I begin my obsessive coverage of the Internet portal, which I thought a year ago could be headed for trouble.

(Interestingly, my other post that day was about Facebook trying to become more mature.)

Read more »

One of AllThingsD.com’s greatest friends–integral to its creation, in fact–has been Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of The Wall Street Journal and former president of the Dow Jones Consumer Media Group.

Crovitz knows a thing or two about the transition mainstream media has been making to new media and, more importantly, was never scared of the change. For us, that was critical, since he consistently said yes to our efforts to create a new kind of tech site within Dow Jones.

Tonight, he appears at a Churchill Club event called “Like It or Not, You’re in the Media Business: It’s Time to Make the Publishing Upheaval Work for You.”

Other speakers include: Neil Chase, VP of author services for Federated Media; Ken Doctor, affiliate analyst of Outsell Inc.; and Jeanette Gibson, editor-in-chief of News@Cisco (CSCO). The event is moderated by Sam Whitmore, editor of Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey.

A description of the event: “Internet technology has made you a publisher. How can you turn that into a huge win for your career and your business? Well, first you might want to study what traditional publishers have learned, and what they’re doing to transform their business. After all, they ought to know. Then look at all the commercially successful bloggers: how did they do that? Then consider Cisco Systems, one of the world’s most successful tech vendors, and why it is now a successful publisher in its own right.”

It takes place tonight, starting at 6 p.m. for dinner, followed by the program at 7 p.m. at the San Mateo (Calif.) Marriott.

Best of all, friends of AllThingsD.com can save $15 off the general rate of $82 by using the discount code here when registering in advance. After inputting your name badge information, you will be shown a payment screen where you can input the discount code: gAllThingsD. If you encounter any difficulties in registering online, email your name, title and company to the Churchill Club at registration@churchillclub.org.

BoomTown video on this interesting topic to come, of course!

The Wall Street Journal gave a big hello to its new owner, Rupert Murdoch, who takes over Dow Jones (owner of this site) today, by publishing this tough piece also today on the disaster of News Corp.’s investment in Gemstar-TV Guide International.

It comes from breakingviews, an online financial commentary Web site that the news organization regularly adds to its print paper and online site. Dow Jones also is a minority investor in the site, which was writing about the recently announced deal for Macrovision to buy Gemstar, in which News Corp. owns a 41% stake.

Money (or, more precisely, non-money) quote:

But in gross terms, Mr. Murdoch looks to have paid $1.6 billion–after selling the magazines in 1991 and receiving cash from Mr. Malone in 2000–for the first half of his Gemstar stake. He paid $6 billion in News Corp. stock for the other half. That is nearly $8 billion for an investment valued at $1 billion today.”

Ouch!

With the entertainment industry reeling from weakness brought on by changing viewers’ watching habits due to the Internet, the news of the talks to end the writers’ strike collapsing on Friday can’t be a good thing for Hollywood.

With the strike now in its sixth week, the studio reps–the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers–and the Writers Guild of America took aim at each other at a Los Angeles hotel, accusing the other side of negotiating in bad faith and being uncooperative.

The two sides still appear far apart on a lot of issues, including unionization of reality shows, but a lot of the issues center on how to split up revenues from new media.

Of course, most of those revenues from the Internet–via downloading and streaming, for example–are still tiny, so the two sides are essentially arguing over nothing, except that that nothing might be something someday.

Got it? (Kind of like Facebook being worth $15 billion!)

In honor of News Corp. officially getting ownership of Dow Jones this week, here’s a recent take from Headzup on the strike from the perspective of AllThingD.com’s new boss (Welcome, Rupe!):

One of the nice things about having a blog is that I can mouth off on just about anything I want and include whatever I want too (such as, for example, shamelessly making videos of my kids in a fruitless attempt to try to cajole Yahoo’s Jerry Yang into having lunch with me).

Today, that means being able to give credit where credit is surely due. In this case, being able to thank L. Gordon Crovitz (pictured here), the outgoing publisher of The Wall Street Journal, for all he has done for both Walt Mossberg and me and all he has done for our little Dow Jones enterprises–this Web site, AllThingsD.com and our annual conference, D: All Things Digital.

Today, with the change in leadership due to the purchase of Dow Jones by News Corp., it was announced that Crovitz is leaving the company as a manager next week, although he will apparently be writing a column on media. He had run the company’s consumer media group, including the flagship Wall Street Journal, WSJ.com, Barron’s and Barron’s Online, MarketWatch and the other properties.

And also its most outlying outpost, AllThingsD.com and our D conference.

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Earlier this week, I ranted on about a rant made by New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller.

Readers had a lot of thoughtful reactions.

To recap: Keller (pictured here) had taken wobbly aim at the Web and its bloggers, calling the Internet a “media tsunami” and too much of its fare “unreliable,” such as sites like Wikipedia and Google News.

“Most of the blog world does not even attempt to report. It recycles. It riffs on the news,” he said in a speech he recently gave in London, in that tiresome tsk-tsk way that must be in the mainstream media mandarin handbook. “That’s not bad. It’s just not enough. Not nearly enough.”

BoomTown, of course, disagreed. I wrote: “This is simply not true going forward, and he should have done some reporting on the subject to find out. There is an ever-increasing number of online outlets who are doing most excellent online reporting.”

Readers weighed in.

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The rumors have been a-flyin’ recently about the reported talks between LinkedIn and News Corp.

Billing itself as the “professional” social network, the serious cousin to the party-hearty twins of MySpace and Facebook, the LinkedIn service is squarely aimed at those with a task in mind from networking to recruiting to career advancement.

In many ways, it is trying to be a business classified service with online presence and connection elements woven in. LinkedIn execs, in fact, throw around the term, “productivity tool,” much in the same way Facebook likes to talk about the joys of “SuperPoking” (by the way, not so joyful to adults).

With 16 million users from all sorts of sectors and spread out globally, LinkedIn getting a look-see by News Corp. makes a lot of sense. It just bought Dow Jones (owner of this site) and its flagship business newspaper The Wall Street Journal, and owns many newspapers, all of which need an online answer to the diminishing print employment-classified business.

In any case, I talked to newly installed LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye recently (before the recent rumors) about the company:

(I still am having problems with the Brightcove player, so I uploaded the video to YouTube.)

Read more »

Life under media mogul Rupert Murdoch will be full of surprises, at least.

Earlier this week, the News Corp. CEO and chairman said while in Australia that he is leaning toward making The Wall Street Journal’s fee-based Web site free, which appears to be getting some resistance from, well, the execs running the flagship newspaper.

Read more »

Did I wangle a seat right next to soon-to-be Dow Jones owner Rupert Murdoch last night at the Web 2.0 Summit dinner?

Of course I did, continuing in the shameless BoomTown tradition of trying to get gratis meals with moguls (like our ongoing efforts to raise money for DonorsChoose.org and get a free lunch with Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang).

(Here’s a picture above that I nicked from Valleywag, as they called me “abrasive” in their post and said I was carrying water for News Corp.-owned MySpace with my incessant questions about rival Facebook’s business model and insane valuation. To the first, I say that’s like a commercial sander calling Comet abrasive and, to the second, I obviously now have to start slapping MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe’s handsome face around to maintain my scratchy cred.)

In any case, the News Corp. chairman and CEO could Web 2.0 it up with the rest of the geeks, as it turned out, and managed to touch on topics ranging from the Facebook valuation to the state of the media industry to the need for even more digitization across the landscape.

If you want to see Murdoch in action, here’s some snippets of his onstage interview, along with MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe with conference co-host John Battelle. It’s a little hard to hear, but worth the watch.

He talks about such topics as his love of Silicon Valley, the future of MySpace (owned by News Corp.), the renewal of DeWolfe’s contract, Google, Facebook, his hope for the New York Times (Would he like to kill it? “That’d be nice,” he answered.), the “half-dead” CNBC (the main competitor of his new Fox Business channel) and, of course, his plans for his newest shiny toy, The Wall Street Journal (more culture!).

I asked him, no surprise, about the $15 billion Facebook valuation, which prompted Murdoch to say News Corp. was drastically undervalued. That’s cheeky!

Thanks also to the other Web 2.0 Co-Host Tim O’Reilly for asking Murdoch when he was going to fire BoomTown! Job security? Nope! Rupe’s answer: “There’s still time!” (Hopefully, after he shivs the Times and CNBC.)

Here the video:

As we have predicted (and advocated) many times in BoomTown, including in this post titled “Free to Be, Rupe and We,” News Corp. head Rupert Murdoch indicated yesterday that he is strongly considering taking down the paid wall at The Wall Street Journal’s online site.

Murdoch, the new owner of Dow Jones (and, by extension, this site too), told a crowd at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference in New York that he had not pulled the free-switch yet, but argued for the move and said he was not worried about it impacting revenue.

His argument in a nutshell: more audience=more ad dollars.

“Will you lose $50 million to $100 million in revenue?” Murdoch asked and then answered his own question. “I don’t think so. If the site is good, you’ll get much more.”

The site is good and you will get much more. I have long thought so, as I wrote in May: “I vote–and I know Murdoch definitely does not preside over a democracy–yes, ma’am, um, sir, for a free WSJ.com.”

Because, while a paid model might have been right in the past, having a larger, powerful and global owner changes the stakes considerably and allows the tremendous site to make bolder moves than ever before.

And such a move would also make the Journal more relevant on the Internet, because a paid wall has kept its content too much apart from the online conversation that is only growing exponentially.

The hit the site might take–potentially lowered ad revenue in the short term and lower ad prices in general–is a necessary one, I think, on a road to much greater prominence the site deserves. It is a risk well worth taking.

And that is not to say there are not many opportunities for premium content offerings.

Why not a paid site aimed at users seeking highly specialized news, data and information on a variety of topics? Why not offer supercharged stock-charting tools? Why not a Walt Mossberg fan club, complete with a free T-shirt (pictured below) upon becoming a member?

While Murdoch declined to drop the hammer on the subscription WSJ.com site, that move seems inevitable now, especially after the New York Times ended its dopey and irksome TimesSelect (even the name is ickily elite-sounding), which gated the best stuff behind a paid wall, effective today.

In the email I just got from them, the Times said: “Since we launched TimesSelect, the Web has evolved into an increasingly open environment. Readers find more news in a greater number of places and interact with it in more meaningful ways. This decision enhances the free flow of New York Times reporting and analysis around the world. It will enable everyone, everywhere to read our news and opinion–as well as to share it, link to it and comment on it.”

They finally got that right. News flash: Free at last.

The ever helpful Jim Louderback–now of Revision3, who works with Om Malik at his GigaOM show on that video site–comes through with an embeddable show.

And I only had to ask nice once after I complained in a post here that the online video show was not viral. Horrors!

Malik hosts the interview show weekly with lawyer Joyce Kim. Now you can see me talking with them about my thoughts about Dow Jones under new owner Rupert Murdoch, as well as on topics like blogging, traditional journalism and the doings at Facebook and Yahoo.

The video also includes a session before mine with Ryan Block of Engadget. Plus you get to see a rare, limited-edition Walt Mossberg “Craplets!” T-shirt.

Thanks Jim! (And also for paper-airplane-sitting Louie, while I blabbered away.)

Here’s the video:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

That old charmer Om Malik lured me onto his online GigaOM Show on Revision3, where he and co-host Joyce Kim interviewed me for its seventh episode about a range of topics.

They included getting me to talk about what I really think of new owner Dow Jones owner Rupert Murdoch (quick summary: He’s certainly been a controversial media mogul, but we’ll see!), as well as my thoughts about blogging, traditional journalism and my two favorite Web companies to report on right now, Facebook and Yahoo.

Bonus: First up in the program is the always clever Ryan Block of Engadget, who I think is one of the sassier tech reporters out there.

I seem unable to embed the whole program–Om, get on it!–but you can see it here, and also hear it, too. But here are some pictures below, including me showing off my limited-edition Walt Mossberg “Craplets!” T-shirt.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Our email box was full today with missives from Yahoos, ex-Yahoos and others, all of whom wanted to weigh in on the latest changes at the company.

All are insightful (and some are even funny, too).

No one is identified, but here are some of my favorite observations, since most of them say it better than I ever could.

No Experience Necessary

(I added the names in parentheses.)

Now we’ve got a CEO who has never been CEO before (Jerry Yang). A COO with limited operations experience (Sue Decker). A CFO who has never been a CFO in his life (Blake Jorgensen) and an EVP of ad sales with no sales experience (Hilary Schneider). Next, I think we’ll hire a CTO who is well versed in arts and culture with no prior tech experience. (Still a mystery.)”

Wasting Away in Margaritaville

I read your latest post and even though I am not at Yahoo anymore, I am going to go outside and use my newest gift to myself, my margarita blender, get brain freeze from too much ice being consumed too quickly, and try to get the confusion of their reorg out of my mind!

“If I was working at Yahoo reading this, I would not know what I am supposed to do tomorrow when I come back into the office! Therefore, I would instead go home tonight, get out my list of headhunters and start sending out the next stack of resumes I did not send out over the weekend!”

Will Work for Free

I’d actually like to be a Yahoo! As would many other people who care. You’d think they’d be looking for the passionate people who’d like to be there. You’d think any of these Internet companies would. But that is a long story.”

Kara Is Hilarious

The Yahoo posts were laugh-out-loud funny, but your coolness factor just went way up for having Jill Sobule at your house!”

Kara Is Mean

You are downright nasty…hard to believe you worked for The WSJ and not the NY Post. Maybe it’s time to lay off for a while? You must be able to write something more intellectually interesting.”

Note to that emailer above: More intellectually interesting than corporate high jinks? I think not!

And given the recent events at Dow Jones, what with our pending acquisition by News Corp., BoomTown and Page Six are about to be related by marriage. So we’re The WSJ and the NY Post!

Nothing like getting the opportunity to verbally harass the new boss right before he turns out to be the new boss!

Here’s the interview I did with News Corp. No. 2, President and COO Peter Chernin. Of course, we discuss–well, I question the media giant’s ethics and Chernin defends them–the then-pending bid to buy Dow Jones (owner of this Web site) by his boss, Rupert Murdoch. He does say News Corp. does not want to “Page Six-ify” the Journal. Phew!

But we also talk about the company’s acquisition of MySpace, its pending joint venture with NBC Universal to create an online video service and the intersection of Hollywood and technology.

By way of background, D: All Things Digital, the annual tech and media conference Walt Mossberg and I host, has been sold out with a long wait list every year we have put it on.

That has meant only a few hundred people can see the interviews and also demos we do live onstage with some of the tech and media industry’s most interesting and important players and products.

The lineups have included Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs, as well as Eric Schmidt of Google, IAC’s Barry Diller, Meg Whitman of eBay, Cisco’s John Chambers and many others.

And we’ve demoed stuff like the Treo when it first came out, as well as digital toilets, Wi-Fi phones and much more.

We usually post the photos and videos of the interviews and demos six or more months after they take place on a separate conference site. This year, our Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski liveblogged D5 and also posted video highlights from all of the sessions immediately on our newly launched site here.

Now, we are posting videos of every session of the 2007 conference here, in full, and we have made all our photo galleries, hosted by SmugMug and mostly shot by our fabulous Asa Mathat, public too. You can also access our videos via the site’s master player here.

Every day, I am going to highlight a different interview or demo from the conference.

So here’s Chernin: