One look at the New York Times’ expansion of Blogrunner and you know it’s going to be a hit. It’s been around a little while, but today the NYT expanded the technology section to include other news sites and bloggers.
If TechMeme was looking for a challenger, it just hatched.
Content is selected by NYT editors based on its significance, but is initially gleaned from Blogrunner.com‘s feed aggregator. The expanded technology section is intended to offer readers a more comprehensive understanding of companies, trends, policy, and business.
NYTimes.com senior vice president and general manager Vivian Schiller speaks more like a leathery general in online combat. “This new site further enhances The New York Times’s dominant position among the influential readers who frequent our business and technical sections. With the deployment of Blogrunner to aggregate the most relevant content from around the Web, we will further solidify our position as the online ‘must-read.'”
It looks as though content is still in the process of being built up, as some categories are lacking. But the Times hasn’t shied away from including traditional competitors like the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal. Click on an article, and the editors provide links to related articles, communities and threads.
“This section is essentially all you need to understand everything that is happening, on any given day, in the world of technology,” said Lawrence Ingrassia, business and financial editor, The New York Times.
And you know, he may be right about that. The layout is fantastic, the user interface is highly intuitive, and it pulls in content from everywhere. Time will tell its weaknesses. Early on, one of those weaknesses appears to be speed, with sources appearing within hours where TechMeme and Google News aggregators pop up within minutes.
But they don’t have that editor’s touch, nor the nice layout. And the NYT website has an automatic 14 million plus readership to direct.
