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.

This is an amazingly hip and funny video from the Sermon Series on Families at North Point Church of Springfield, Mo., posted on GodTube.

GodTube, which describes itself as a Christian video-driven social-networking site, “where users find inspiration, interact, chat, share and upload” Christian video, has about 2 million users per month.

GodTube also lets churches stream sermons and other events live on its “Godcaster” subscription service.

Also, its motto is “Broadcast Him,” but GodTube also calls itself “Jesus 2.0.” Get it?

Perhaps more in the holy-grail territory, GodTube just nabbed $30 million this week in funding from GLG Partners (GLG), which is also an investor in the less-holy Glam Media site, according to paidContent.

That gives the Dallas-based GodTube a $150 million valuation, putting it right up there with other miraculous start-up valuations like yesterday’s $500 million valuation for the online ad agency Spot Runner.

Praise the VC (and, for GodTube fans, JC too)!

Here’s the North Point Church video on GodTube:

Here’s a few video clips of Yahoo’s Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of its Network division, onstage at paidContent’s Economics of Social Media conference on Tuesday.

In the first, he egregiously ignores BoomTown’s subtle (as a hammer!) way of asking about the Microsoft (MSFT) situation.

In the second, Weiner talks about Yahoo’s (YHOO) social-networking strategy (translation: this is not yet another social network, because we–oops–neglected to build one people liked!).

In the third, he talks about Yahoo’s “White Hat” ad plans to allow consumers to someday pick their own ads.

And, finally, in the fourth clip, Weiner disses YouTube’s (GOOG) business model (or lack thereof).

Unfortunately not here, our back-and-forth about what kind of food Yahoo would serve if it were a restaurant–you had to be there–given its reputation for being all over the map. My suggestion: Everything.

But, personally, BoomTown really enjoyed Weiner’s wire-cutting performance in the Yahoo spoof video, called “All Hands, the Movie,” which Yahoo execs made and showed to its troops recently.

Weiner’s performance, which is at the start in a James-Bond-diffusing-the-bomb moment, is actually really good (and especially compared to other execs, like the golf sadist role for CEO Jerry Yang and the broom-wielding President Sue Decker).

Plus, finally–a really good use for his legendary “Miami Vice” stubble beard.

Here’s a link to Valleywag, which got a copy of the full (and quite clever) video, and a screen shot of Weiner below.

Yesterday, I traveled to Los Angeles for paidContent’s second Economics of Social Media conference, which opened last night and is being held all day today at the Skirball Cultural Center.

This morning, I am interviewing Steve Wadsworth, who helms Walt Disney’s (DIS) Internet businesses.

And after sating myself with as much Club Penguin info as possible, I will be sitting rapt in the front row, as folks like Yahoo’s (YHOO) Jeff Weiner, Bebo’s Joanna Shields and AOL’s (TWX) Ron Grant talk about how social media is going to finally make money.

BoomTown is on a vision quest to answer that question in the coming year, so we are kicking entrepreneurs and taking names!

Here’s a short video I did on the opening night, including talking to paidContent’s Staci Kramer and Seth Goldstein of Social Media.

But, first, it starts with a tour of my temporary L.A. abode at the home of Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis:

Should they stay or should they go now?

If they go there will be trouble. And if they stay it will be double.

In other words, BoomTown’s got nothing!

I am traveling this morning to Los Angeles for paidContent’s Economics of Social Media conference, where I will interview Walt Disney Internet Group President Steve Wadsworth onstage tomorrow.

But I will be sure to update after I arrive, as I have a new theory on the takeover I am noodling on.

Until then, here’s a nice summation from The Wall Street Journal here, saying absolutely nothing new too, but nicely hashing over the details thus far.

Money quote: “There was no direct contact between the two sides this past weekend and people close to both camps said they were preparing for the next stage of battle.”

Thus, while loins are apparently being girded, here is a very nice video of the Clash, singing their hit song (and how much do I love this song? Much!):

So what prompted TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington to pen a pugnacious piece on how blogs should not be raising so much venture capital and instead roll themselves into a “Dream Team,” with the unusual title of “More Bloggers Raising Money. Here Comes Politics. And Here Comes My Rant” yesterday?

Well, besides garnering Arrington a big dollop of traffic and attention, which is perhaps one of the blog entrepreneur’s most impressive talents, could it have something to do with the fact that he’s been busy recently talking to several well-known tech blogs about joining a roll-up organized by TechCrunch itself?

Or that he has told several people I spoke to that TechCrunch was considering doing this by raising as much as $15 million, giving it a $35 million valuation?

Reached by email last night, the voluble Arrington declined to comment.

Thus, a BoomTown translation of his TechCrunch piece is Job No. 1!

Arrington wrote: More blogs are raising venture capital, we’re hearing from people they’ve pitched. Newcomer Silicon Alley Insider is looking for a $3 million to $5 million round, if reports are correct. And paidContent is pitching for a second round in that same range (paidContent raised a round of “less than $1 million” in 2006). We’re also hearing that paidContent is trying to sell the company for $15 million or more, and just bail out with some spending money.

Translation: If that scalawag Henry Blodget thinks he can steal even an iota of my thunder, he better get ready to rumble. And while it is entirely incorrect that paidContent is selling itself or raising that much money, I love the smell of napalm in the morning and FUD in the blogosphere!

[BoomTown actually contacted paidContent’s founder, Rafat Ali, who strongly reiterated that the site might raise a very small amount of money, nowhere close to $3 million to $5 million, and was not trying to sell the company at all.]

Arrington wrote: These rumored deals come as funding for bloggers is heating up in general. Just a month ago VentureBeat reported a $320,000 raise. In 2007 we saw Sugar Inc. ($10 million), GigaOm ($1 million), Xconomy, Blogher ($3.5 million) and The Huffington Post ($10 million) raise venture capital. That’s at least $25 million in 2007 invested in blogs and blog networks.

As far as we know, no significant investments were made in blogs in 2005. Weblogs, Inc. raised around $300,000 in 2004, but before they got around to spending it they had sold themselves to AOL (TWX) for an estimated $25 million. The investors, including Mark Cuban, received 15x on their initial investment.

Translation: And if that elfin Jason Calacanis can score, where’s MY payoff!?! I mean, I am the Jason Calacanis of Web 2.0, aren’t I!? The Mac Daddy of the widget economy! The Sultan of Zing! And did Calacanis ever have the chutzpah to pose for a picture lighting cigars with a handful of crisp, flaming Benjamins! I think not!

Arrington wrote: But apart from that first 2004 investment in Weblogs, Inc., there haven’t been any sales or liquidity events to suggest these investments will be a success. And back then blogging was a cakewalk. Most bloggers linked to each other constantly in a state of brotherly or sisterly love. No one was making any money or getting much attention, so for the most part people got along (with notable exceptions like engadget/gizmodo, who play to win).

Translation: The rain may never fall till after sundown./By eight, the morning fog must disappear./In short, there’s simply not/A more congenial spot/For happily-ever-aftering than here/In Camelot.

Arrington wrote: Those salad days are long gone. Writers suddenly want to be paid market wages, far above the $5 per post that they received two years ago. No, we’re talking a big salary, with benefits, and stock options. There went half your margins at least.

Translation: Wages?! Big salary!? Benefits!? Stock options!!!??? Half your margins!!? Who do these people think they are? The Web 2.0 shooting stars I write about incessantly in TechCrunch?

Arrington wrote: And writing good content is only half the battle. You have to figure out the complex, dynamic web of politics between bloggers and mainstream media before you post to know where to get support. And you’ll need support in the form of links from other prominent bloggers. An early push can take a post and make it a headline on TechMeme, which leads to page views and notice by sponsors. But since blogging is almost by definition a conversation between bloggers, fights tend to break out over emotional issues. Cliques develop. Can you count on them to support you down the road?

Translation: TechCrunch is from Mars, Valleywag is from Venus.

Arrington wrote: Personally, I’ve found that if a fight is necessary, fight clean and fight hard. Make it as bloody as possible and end it fast, with no loose ends dangling about. Leave no lingering emotional stone unturned. When everyone gets up and dusts themselves off, the issue should have been resolved one way or the other, and both sides should be happy to shake hands and tango another day, even if the handshaking is done privately. Those that aren’t capable of doing that tend to push themselves to the outskirts of the blogosphere, where their main job is to lob in attacks at random intervals, pursuing long-forgotten insults.

Translation: Bloody tango? Ouch. Ew. Yuk. And handshakes after that seems unhygienic. But let’s solider on. Aha! Another Broadway musical clue! The Jets are gonna have their day/Tonight/The Jets are gonna have their way/Tonight/The Puerto Ricans grumble/”Fair fight”/But if they start a rumble/We’ll rumble ‘em right.

Arrington wrote: So today, at best, I’d describe the blogosphere as a frontier town with no lawman (I mean, O’Reilly has a badge on, but no gun and no jail). You can do just about anything you want, but the politically savvy folks tend to arm themselves to the teeth and gang together to protect their property. Everyone else is in the middle of chaos, either fighting blindly for attention or politely asking (by linking early and linking often) if they can join the big Gang.

Translation: Wait, now the metaphor has shifted to the Old West? OK, we can keep up: Anything you can do, I can do better./I can do anything better than you./No, you can’t./Yes, I can./No, you can’t./Yes, I can./No, you can’t./Yes, I can, Yes, I can!

Arrington wrote: And now that the big guys in the Gang are being injected with capital, hiring tens of employees and expanding their businesses, they suddenly have a lot more to lose. Linking is never done just because. Rather, links are your political capital that must be expended appropriately. Don’t link at the right time and in two weeks when you’re pushing your own headline, you’ll wish you had. When you stop seeing other blogs as people you admire and want to discuss things with, and start to see them as your competitor, your brain shifts and you stop linking the way you had previously.

Translation: Hey, how did we get to Washington, D.C. and the inside of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s cerebral cortex in the midst of yet another compromised political calculation? It’s like we’re on “Fantastic Voyage”!

Arrington: Luckily, the newbie bloggers are there to fill in the links when they’re needed. That’s why, if you are a mid-level blogger, you are likely courted by the bigger blogs looking to get your support. If you know what’s going on and are willing to play the game, you can see your blog rise very, very quickly. Choose the wrong blog, though, and you may find yourself alone and lonely in your forgotten blog.

As an aside, when I see a young but promising blogger, I’ll start linking to him or her constantly to build them up (others, like Winer, Scoble, Jarvis and Rubel did that for me). The goal is to help move them up to a position of influence as quickly as possible. The more non-crazy influencers in the game, the easier it is to ignore the noise generators and the better the overall conversation becomes. Over the last year, for example, Silicon Alley Insider, CenterNetworks, LouisGray and Mathew Ingram I’ve been pushing hard. These guys rarely agree with me, but when they talk I listen because they’ve put some thought into what they are saying and how they are saying it. Those guys haven’t hit the big politics yet, and tend to link out a lot to everyone. They are a very important part of the ecosystem–pushing their link votes toward stories they find interesting and helping those other bloggers get headlines and maintain their place in the Gang.

Translation: Next stop, the stylings of Mr. Michael Corleone! There are many things my father taught me here in this room. He taught me: keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.

Arrington wrote: So what’s the point of this rant? Well, all this money flowing into the blogosphere is disrupting the complicated and emotional, but also stable way things are done. Bloggers with money and employees and health care programs and boards of directors and shareholders have to play politics with a whole new group of people, splitting them away from what they do best–Fighting the Blog War. Their behavior can become erratic as they have to decide to tone down their writing to get a certain type of sponsor on board, which in turn lets them make payroll. Investors want to see growth, so more and more blogs are launched, but perhaps without the right talent to grow it into a long-term business.

If a VC hands you a check, their intention is not to hang around for 20 years while you build a nice lifestyle business for yourself. What they want to see is an exit, preferably a 10x or higher exit, within 3 to 4 years. But something tells me that few of these networks are going to be able to grow quite as easily as they think and reach those liquidity events. The talent is, increasingly, locked up. Even when new talent is discovered or trained, every niche has serious heavyweights already there with page views and advertising dollars to back them up for a long fight.

Translation: Finally, the point! Which is: Assimilate or Die!

Arrington wrote: At some point it’s going to become painfully obvious that the only way to get to a massive valuation is for the top talent to band together in a company where they each have an equity stake and therefore a reason to work all night on that next great story. They’ll each have their own space to stretch their legs and let their personality run around a little. Someone needs to pony up a big round of financing around an existing blog, or perhaps a new entity, and then start rolling them up into a big fat CNET-crushing $200 million/year in revenue business.

Translation: This is my sneaky but clever way of floating a trial balloon of an effort I am already trying to organize. The existing blog? Mine! The new entity? Run by me! The $200 million a year? Mine, again! Now, enough about me–what do you think of me?

Arrington wrote: It can happen. In fact it’s almost certainly going to happen. But if you bloggers go out there and raise $3 million to $5 million on say a $10 million valuation, you’ve just priced yourself out of the roll-up. That option will be closed to you, and you’ll be stuck out in the cold, taking life-support payments from Federated Media or another ad network, and having a generally awful time running your business.

Translation: Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.

Arrington wrote: What I’d like to see, and even be a part of, is the blogger equivalent to the 1992 U.S. Men’s Basketball Dream Team. That team could take CNET apart in a year, hire the best of the survivors there, and then move on to bigger prey.

Translation: After we are done bloody-tangoing with Neil Ashe at CNET (CNET), Owen Thomas and his evil overlord Nick Denton better sleep with one eye open.

Arrington wrote: Just the thought of being a part of something like that has held us back from raising any outside capital at all. I believe we have the beginning of a team that can play a role in this new Dream Team.

So think twice before taking that venture money, guys. You may be shutting more doors of opportunity than you realize.

Translation: By saying we have held back from raising any outside capital at all, what I really mean to say is that I am going to do it.

Resistance is futile.

Speaking of Rafat Ali, here is a video of a panel I did at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills. Calif., on April 26 at paidContent.org’s conference, “The Economics of Social Media.”

Our session covered how mainstream media looks at the explosion of social media, but really was about the woes of the traditional news business and what to do about them.

The panelists included: Vivian Schiller, who runs NYTimes.com; Topix.net CEO Rich Skrenta; NPR CEO Ken Stern; and me–all moderated by Reed Business CEO Tad Smith.

It’s a decent panel, with a lot of good questions from the audience. A text report of the event is here.

It’s a little long, but here you go:

On a recent trip to Los Angeles, I went to visit Rafat Ali, the energetic founder of ContentNext Media Inc.

While publisher and editor Ali’s got two other sites, the flagship is paidContent.org, which covers the business of digital content with a fine-tooth comb.

Ali started the site in 2002 after stints at Silicon Alley Reporter and the ill-timed Inside.com. But his entrepreneurial effort has taken off and become one of the better sites for up-to-the-minute information about the online media business.

Just this weekend, for example, Ali broke the news that Wenda Harris Millard was out as Yahoo’s ad chief (though I did predict the move–an educated guess on my part–here last week), as well as posting stories about breaking news at Dow Jones, ABC and the $8 million in funding that Digg founders just got for their new online video show site, Revision3.

ContentNext got a small amount of funding last summer from Alan Patricof’s Greycroft Partners and recently added longtime online exec Larry Kramer to the board. The company now has 20 employees, including the tireless executive editor Staci Kramer. It makes its revenue via advertising and now also from conferences.

So here is a video I did on my recent visit to ContentNext’s Santa Monica, Calif., digs, which they moved into in March (most of the company’s offices had previously been at Ali’s various homes), along with some observations from Ali:

So I spent Thursday at the first conference outing by paidContent, the excellent news site dedicated to covering the business of digital media and helmed by Rafat Ali. As a conference producer and host with Walt, I know all the myriad challenges of organizing such an event and the paidContent team (including, but not limited to, the tireless Staci Kramer and the bemused Jimmy Guterman). They pulled it off incredibly well for a maiden voyage. Lots of great information imparted, useful schmoozing and very nice brownies at one break.

I was struck by a lot of what I heard there, starting the night before with a dinner at Spago hosted by Tad Smith, CEO of Reed Business Information. That bastion of Hollywood show-offery was the perfect venue for a short Q&A with Variety Editor Peter Bart and longtime Hollywood producer and mogul Peter Guber, who have a show on cable focusing on chats and debates with the entertainment industry’s bigwigs called “Sunday Morning Shootout.” They are definitely an amusing duo, kibitzing back and forth like the old pros they are.

They talked about the continued importance of mass audience and of “hits,” like the recent surprise success of the movie “300.” Check.

Guber noted that Hollywood’s “whole world is changing in terms of reach,” adding that the entertainment industry was no longer limited by geography. I couldn’t agree more–Beverly Hills 90210 and beautiful downtown Burbank no longer rule the roost.

They were relatively upbeat in their assessment of the future of the theatrical movie business. About that, I was a bit dubious, as more digital choices and home-theater improvements give everyone a plethora of options about where to spend their time.

But I nearly fell off my well-upholstered chair when Bart said, in an off-the-cuff remark, that YouTube might be history within four years. He came out with this particular nugget in the midst of a discussion about the nature of the audience and its desires, which Bart said did not change that much from era to era. He noted that great love stories always were going to do well (he actually used “Love Story” as the example) and that basic tastes don’t really vary.

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