All Things Digital

As readers of AllThingsD.com might have noticed, we added MarketWatch columnist Therese Poletti (pictured here) to the main rail of the site today.

Her twice-weekly column, Tech Tales, which appears on MarketWatch on Tuesdays and Thursdays, will also be published here too.

Poletti joins Eric Savitz (pictured here) of Barron’s, whose posts on his Tech Trader Daily blog about tech stocks have been appearing on the front of ATD several times a day for the past month.

We added these two very talented voices from other publications within Dow Jones (owner of this site), because we want to bring more cogent and useful news and analysis about tech and media to our readers. Also, they rock.

In all seriousness, the tech blogging arena is one with a lot of players–some great and some not so much–so we are especially proud of the high standards, accuracy and quality that each of these writers represents.

We will be adding more writers soon, so watch this space.

Of course, we also don’t believe in only cross-promoting Dow Jones brands, and publish a half-dozen major links to other sites daily in Voices, along with our tabbed front page feeds that link directly to CNET, paidContent, GigaOm and Techmeme.

We admire the work those sites are doing and, most of all, want to give our readers as many ways as possible to access the best posts being done across the digital landscape.

Of course, BoomTown and John Paczkowski’s Digital Daily remain the anchor of the main rail, while the work of Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret gets its own place at the top of the main home page of ATD.

In all, we hope readers find our commitment to giving you high-quality and incisive work–from scoops to analysis to reviews–helpful and we welcome any feedback.

Here’s the classic stylings of Apple’s Steve Jobs, showing off the iPhone 3G, from the keynote today at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Yes, those are actual oohs and ahs from the audience, which includes a massive passel of press, as if Jobs was showing them the secret to eternal happiness (which is, by the way, not a new iPhone, but a dozen tasty donuts).

Here’s the video from MarketWatch on WSJ.com:

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.

Eek, diamonds are now apparently being used in a new water-delivery system that debuted at the International Builder’s Show in Orlando, Fla., this week.

For those who do not know it, BoomTown is a closet–get it??–home renovation freak and once had a column in The Wall Street Journal called “Home Economics.” (Here is a link to my 2004 review of high-tech toilets, for example, with the unfortunate lede: “Is happiness a warm toilet seat?”)

Nonetheless, we press on, and “Home Economics” might even return here in a new video format, so get ready.

Until then, check out this sparkling MarketWatch video:

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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Put your feet up and watch some dandy videos from WSJ Online and MarketWatch, our very nice relatives at Dow Jones (AllThingsD is the crazy cousin of this family and Rupe is our new parental unit).

First, Microsoft unveils newest Zune Media players, in attractive guano-green, as the clever Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski notes in his post yesterday:

Then Starbucks joins up with Apple for a new “Song a Day” promotion, where they will give away 50 million songs all for the greater glory of the iTunes Wi-Fi Music stores and the sale of more Caramel Macchiatos!:

And, hey, we might see a national economic recession coming, but techies in the San Francisco Bay area are apparently safe, all due to Facebook, Google and green tech:

MarketWatch’s Paul Lin talks to Palm CEO Ed Colligan about its new $99 Centro smart phone, unveiled yesterday.

I’m going to use my $100 rebate I get from the I-had-to-have-it-before-my-brother iPhone to get one! And I’ll even have a dollar left over for a refreshing can of soda.

Watch Colligan explain here:

Hopefully, the Centro will do a little better than Palm’s Foleo, which was demoed at our D5 and was dumped before the launch.

And, as an added bonus, here is that Foleo demo video by Jeff Hawkins:

I have known Larry Kramer since I was a college student in Washington, D.C., and he hired me as a stringer for the Washington Post’s Metro section–even after I insulted him about the newspaper’s terrible coverage of students. At the time, Kramer was running the section.

Since then–back in the dark ages and after a stint at the San Francisco Examiner–he has spent a lot of his time over the past decade building the financial news site MarketWatch, which was owned in large part by CBS and then sold to Dow Jones (owner of this site) in 2005.

He stayed on for a bit at CBS, working on its digital initiatives, but recently signed on as a senior adviser to Boston-based Polaris Ventures. There, he’ll be advising them on digital-media issues and helping their portfolio of companies.

Kramer has always had a lot of fast-forward opinions about the changes–or, more accurately, the turmoil–suffered by old-media companies in the wake of the digital onslaught. He talks about all that here, as well as making a prediction about the end of search as the big power in the sector.

Here is the video:

Here is an interesting video by WSJ.com’s Andy Jordan on a movement called “steampunk,” where modern-day gadgets are rebuilt to look as if they were made in Victorian times. We liked the porthole CD player a lot:

And MarketWatch’s media maven Jon Friedman does a video post related to his Media Web column on the Washington Post’s political reporter Anne Kornblut, using her to depict what the new breed of reporter needs to know how to do–namely, everything multimedia.

Should The Wall Street Journal’s paid site, WSJ.com, become free now that media mogul Rupert Murdoch has bought Dow Jones?

That debate has been all over the Web since News Corp. won its battle to buy Dow Jones (owner of this site) last week, including posts by Jeff Jarvis and Fred Wilson in favor of the move.

But former MarketWatch head Larry Kramer disagreed, noting that his old site should be the free product, while the Journal’s content should remain premium.

Sorry, Larry, but I vote–and I know Murdoch (pictured here from a magazine spread with an Apple computer at the ready, apparently) definitely does not preside over a democracy–yes, ma’am, um, sir, for a free WSJ.com.

(And just to show this is not a kiss-up to the new boss, but a cogent analysis of the landscape for the Journal moving forward under Murdoch, here is a video interview posted below that I did in Los Angeles with Beet.TV’s Andy Plesser back in May about the possible News Corp. takeover and how I felt about the situation. Not so happy and also really wrong about Rupe’s chances of winning Dow Jones, as you will see.)

Also, I have posted many times on this subject, such as this recent piece.

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