Outside the Lines

As I wrote in a post in June, we are updating our look and feel after nearly 13 years of variations on neon yellow and green.

We are expanding our beta testing, so you may be seeing the new site when you come to any of the CNET sites (News, Reviews, Downloads, CNET TV).

It's a work in progress--if you land on the new pages, give us some feedback (fill out the brief feedback form linked at the top of the pages).

With the Democratic and Republican national conventions coming up in Denver and St. Paul in the next few weeks, we are planning our coverage across CNET News and CBSNews.com. (Being part of CBS has some nice advantages.) CNET News reporters Declan McCullagh, Stephanie Condon, and Kara Tsuboi will be on the scene, covering the tech policies and positions of the presidential and vice presidential candidates. In addition, they will be roaming the convention floors, interviewing delegates, politicians, and pundits on tech-related issues such as Net neutrality, Internet taxation, and privacy.

CBS Evening News will have its usual wall-to-wall coverage of the conventions, anchored by Katie Couric and the CBS News political team, including CBS Senior Political Correspondent Jeff Greenfield and Face the Nation's Bob Schieffer. The DNC and RNC convention coverage will also be Webcast live on CBSNews.com.

In addition, following the television broadcast coverage, CBSNews.com and CNET are partnering to produce live, Web-only shows at both conventions. From 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. EDT, Katie will host a live Webcast, analyzing the day's events along with the CBS political team and other special guests.

If you have a question about the candidates, campaigns, conventions or other topics that you think should be addressed by Katie and crew, you can submit them by going to the CBS News pages for the Democratic National Convention and Republican National Convention. Stay tuned for more updates on our convention coverage.

We are continuing our summer preview of the new CNET with revamped News and Downloads pages in addition to the redesigned Reviews and CNET.com home page introduced last month.

As with our first beta test, a small percent of random visitors to CNET sites will be presented with the new pages. We've had a lot of feedback (please keep it coming!), and we'll continue to make changes are we gather more info and head toward the official launch later this summer.

See also: CNET's new, improved look

After more than a dozen years of bringing you our content surrounded by yellow and green, CNET is getting a new look. As you can see above, the carnival of colors is being replaced by a cleaner look that pivots off our content and our updated red CNET logo.

Our designers and engineers have been at work on this site revamp for many months, incorporating feedback based on the activities of millions of users and scores of alpha testers in our labs. Now we are entering the first phase of our beta release. A small percent of random visitors to CNET.com will be presented with the new look on the home and Reviews pages. Revised CNET News and Downloads sites will be in beta test in a few weeks.

Why redesign the CNET site?

Web sites are in a state of continuous evolution, and over the years, CNET has undergone several minor facelifts. We decided it was time for a more substantial change that did a better job of presenting our content to 17 million monthly visitors (Nielsen/NetRatings, May 2008).

CNET started out in 1992 as c/net, meaning Computer Network, a 24-hour cable network about computers and technology with original online content. CNET online launched in June 1995 and quickly became a huge success. Over the years, we stuck with the neon yellow legacy from the TV days as the Internet grew to encompass all forms of media.

We had two key goals with this CNET revamp--make the site easier to use and speed it up. Simplicity is the major theme of this design, and that includes the new "pipeless" CNET logo, a more consistent site structure and a streamlined color palette.

The back-end infrastructure has also been reengineered. We have a new API that is helping to deliver pages 40 to 50 percent faster, and makes it easier for our partners, such as Yahoo and Univision, to work with our content.

All together, the new look, as in the Reviews page below, provides a much improved framework for exposing our content, which is the ultimate purpose of the design.

It's a work in progress, so if you land on the new pages, give us some feedback (fill out the brief feedback form linked at the top of the pages).

We will be making changes and opening the revamped site up to additional users over the next several weeks as it stabilizes.

The echo chamber of the blogosphere is concerned about too much refactored content and a lack of original thought in the raging river of blog posts flowing into feed readers and Web crawlers (see Techmeme). There are many worse problems in the world than what is sometimes unpleasantly called blogorrhea. You could be a blogger in China dancing around government censorship.

Internet and Web 2.0 technologies have allowed anyone to be a writer, publisher, and pundit just by clicking the publish button. Along with the flood of interesting and insightful content comes the boring and feckless.

It's up to individuals and algorithms to sort out the more useful, value-added content. Hopefully, it floats to the top. You can complain about me-too, derivative content without much value add, but we aren't going to have a priesthood that decides who is allowed to publish. blogorrhea in a democracy is incurable. We should continue to celebrate the blog revolution and vote with our gestures of attention.

Covering the technology industry is similar to covering sports or other topics that have a passionate core of fans. There are teams (companies), players (personalities), games (competing products and services). Tech information moves at fairly high velocity. Blogs that can deliver the play by play and color commentary with accuracy, authority, and speed will be valued by fans. That's what we try to do every day at CNET News.com.

The debate over whether a blogger is a journalist is a dead end. The basic principles of journalism--like fact checking--should be a benchmark for both blogs and so-called mainstream media. Many of the popular technology blogs are staffed by experienced journalists. Many bloggers without formal journalism training have earned their stripes, although some play too loose and fast and don't add enough to move the conversation forward.

Moving the conversation forward is what the blogosphere does best. It starts with an original thought or angle, a scoop of perception, and others add their own perspectives and discoveries to the data pool. You end up with a rich "web" of information and links about a particular item.

Dealing with the blogorrhea factor--the overflow of rather useless contributions to the data pool--is problematic, but don't blame Techmeme or your feed reader. In an ideal world, the crap sinks to the bottom of the pool.

The blogosphere is atwitter (see Techmeme) with Mike Arrington's latest call for someone 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 per year in revenue business."

It's pleasing to have Mike and others targeting CNET. It must mean that we are at the top of the heap. Competitive envy comes with the territory. And I admire what Mike, Om Malik, Matt Marshall, Rafat Ali, and others have done to build their networks and companies. In fact, we are all friends.

But I'm all for competing. We have lots of ammunition stored up. And our troops across CNET News.com, Webware, Crave, Reviews, and Download.com are in the field as I speak, getting after the important stories.