New York Times Extra: Who Cares About Clutter, It’s All Good

Isn’t it funny how a move by traditional media can divide the blogosphere?  Today’s move is by none other than The New York Times: they opened up their front page to third party content.  If you enable Times Extra, you get up to eight related stories beneath each NYT main story.   These stories are picked by BlogRunner, the TechMeme-like technology the Times acquired 3 years ago.  The sources could be major blogs, or direct competitors: right now the the Auto-Exec’s on Capitol Hill story is followed by clips from the Wall Street Journal.

(Image credit: ReadWriteWeb)

If you’re blogging, chances are you’ve been doing this forever, either manually, or by Zemanta’s handy tool (see below). But this level of openness is a bit unusual from traditional media – which is why I’m surprised TechCrunch sums up the move as The New York Times Clutters Up Its Homepage With Links From Elsewhere (In Beta).   Clutter or not, I think it’s a very positive move, so I am with ReadWriteWeb and others who welcome this step of openness.

Not that I am comparing CloudAve to the venerable New York Times, but it’s a perfect opportunity to talk about some of our plans.  As you may have noticed, we have a few regular writers and often publish pieces by guest authors.  We also publish the daily CloudNews, which is increasingly popular, but there’s a lot we can improve.

To answer questions we received, CloudNews is manually edited – we think the hand-selection and brief summaries add value that’s still hard to provide solely by technology – hey, even TechMeme agrees: Guess what? Automated news doesn’t quite work.  For now CloudNews is published once a day, as a regular blog post – I’d like to see it refresh round-the-clock, under it’s own tab as well as in a widget.   We will get there, and to more changes, but please be patient, as CloudAve is being published on a pre-release platform, still under development.

In the meantime, if you have something to say on Cloud Computing, SaaS, anything related, whether you agree with us or are eager to debate (btw., there is no “us”, we often debate amongst ourselves), let us know, we welcome guest contributions.

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