Only it seems someone forgot to tell the Blogrunner webmaster, because according to the homepage and About page, The Annotated New York Times is "NOT affiliated with The New York Times". Huh?

In any case, it turns out NY Times plans to add Blogrunner/Annotated NYT to their own website, which is a fantastic idea. It will bring blogs well and truly into The Gray Lady's orbit, not to mention remix culture.

This is great news for us, because it brings our brand of web technology news, reviews and analysis to a much wider audience. It also means that the innovative and often little known startups we write about daily get a chance to be seen in a mainstream publication. The New York Times has a reputation for quality and in-depth journalism, attributes that we strive for on ReadWriteWeb - so we're excited about this partnership.

Along with ReadWriteWeb, The New York Times will also syndicate content from our friends at VentureBeat and GigaOm. The New York Times re-design is now live, although syndicated content won't go live until October.

Andy Plesser from Beet.TV had the scoop on this story, along with a video interview with Vindu Goel, deputy technology editor at The New York Times.

I want to especially thank Bernard Lunn, ReadWriteWeb's Business Development Manager, for getting this deal. We at ReadWriteWeb are proud to have our growing brand associated with the prestigious New York Times - maybe now our families and friends will understand what we do for a living ;-)

As Andre Behrens points out in the announcement, the Times is trying to recreate the skimming experience of the physical newspaper, where you often discover random articles that you would probably never notice in the online version.

The layout of the new online application is somewhat similar to that of the Times Reader desktop application, but the team is also trying out some new features. Older articles, for example, gradually fade out as they get older. The newest articles just have a white background.

Overall, the app feels very fluid and lightweight, and the article skimmer provides a great interface for browsing the site's content. It is just a shame that you can't actually read the articles in the same interface.

The New York Times has done a lot of interesting things on the web lately, including opening up an API that allows developers to search the newspaper's articles.

The newspaper business is clearly struggling to reinvent itself on the web, and this experiment is only a small step in this direction - but it is experiments like this that make it clear that there is still a lot of life left in the online newspaper business.

Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb has an existing syndication arrangement with The New York Times

Now, this may seem like a relatively insignificant step for people who live and breathe the Web every day. But for traditional media companies, this sharing of column inches with other publications is not only difficult, it's something they have feared (emphasis is mine):

"The days when content sites were afraid to link to other sites are over," said Marc Frons, chief technology officer for digital operations for The New York Times Company.

So it comes as little surprise that NYT is dipping its toe in the water rather cautiously. Rather than replacing the default front page, Times Extra will serve as an additional version of the NYT front page that users can activate by clicking a link. However, that version only remains active for 24 hours, at which point the user will have to activate the Times Extra front page, again.

Whatever the case, this is a step in the right direction. A small step, but a good step nonetheless. Hopefully, the next move to be open will involve NYT sharing the metrics about how many users opt to use Times Extra and - given the options - where they choose to go for their news.

Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb has an existing syndication arrangement with The New York Times

Using various open source technologies such as jQuery, the Yahoo! User Interface Library and the Maintainable Framework, Reading Radar lets you scan the New York Times top sellers and read reviews and related book information from Amazon; all without the distractions of other content on both the New York Times and Amazon sites.

Inspired by the release of The New York Times Best Sellers API, Herren decided to try and create a site that could be on "auto-pilot."

"I designed the site to use extensive caching of the NYT and Amazon APIs to minimize remote calls, but update the data often enough so that the information would be fresh."

The Maintainable Framework and the Zend framework provided a means to create the PHP based site, and jQuery, the popular JavaScript library along with YUI were used to present the data and provide the user interaction.

"The NYT API was simple enough to use. The REST API offers three response formats, XML, JSON, or serialized PHP. I did find a bug in the API, and was very pleased how reactive the NYT API team was to resolve the problem. Kudos!" Herren wrote on his blog.

If you're interested in more technical details, take a look at Herren's post announcing the release.

Times Wire is the first NYT product built with its own Newswire API. The product will be officially launching tomorrow with a tab on the NYT homepage, but you can see it in action now.

Times Wire is a useful new product and shows that the NYT is actively tapping into two big trends on the Web currently: real time information and personalization. The 'river of news' format isn't as overwhelming as it is on the new FriendFeed page, where a torrent of content will scroll past the bewildered user in the blink of an eye. I blinked a lot of times over the course of a couple of minutes before I saw an update to the 'All News' section in Times Wire. This is probably a good thing for a news site, because people need at least a bit of time to digest news.

The New York Times is proving itself to be a leader among the big newspapers in not only keeping up with the latest Internet trends, but sometimes extending them. This particular product probably won't be hugely useful for the general public, it seems more like a product that info junkies (like bloggers) and newshounds would enjoy. But it's definitely a worthwhile experiment.

Disclosure: The NYTimes is a syndication partner of ReadWriteWeb.

Another nice feature of the Reader application is the ability to 'browse' the paper by zooming out and seeing previews of the surrounding pages, which nicely recreates the feeling of browsing the 'real' paper.

Oddly, though, during our tests, the scroll wheel on our mouse didn't work in the application, and we had to resort to using the keyboard to flip pages.

For Free: Crossword, Front Page, Business, Magazine, and Most Emailed

If you don't subscribe to the Times or Times Reader, you can still access articles from the New York Times front page, the business section, and the most emailed articles from the Times. If you love the New York Times crossword puzzle, you will be happy to hear that an interactive version of the day's puzzle is also available for free.

For the Sunday Edition, content from the Magazine is available for free, though the Sunday Business section is hidden behind the paywall.

It is important to note that the Times already gives readers offline access to its content through its iPhone application, and a lot of the functionality of the Reader application is also duplicated in the Article Skimmer - though without offline access, of course.

The Times Reader excels in the presentation of the content, and while apps like this will surely not be enough to save the newspaper industry, we are glad to see that the Times continues to innovate and try new business models and ways to reach and retain readers.

Disclosure: The NYTimes is a syndication partner of ReadWriteWeb.

Users are assigned a "Times IQ," which is a numerical representation of how up-to-date they are on the current goings on in the world. Users of the Times app also get to compare their news knowledge with their friends and the rest of Facebook.

When Facebook released their platform earlier this year, the Washington Post was one of the first major print newspapers to jump on board with their wildly successful Political Compass application -- a 10 question quiz to determine your approximate political leanings. Even though the Compass is listed in the "Just for Fun" category, it has garnered close to 350,000 users.

Unfortunately for the Washington Post, their application doesn't do much to push users to the newspaper's web site. The New York Times has taken a different tactic, however, and done a lot to nudge users toward their content. First, of course, by creating an app that seeks user engagement on a daily basis. Unlike the Post application, which you use once then wear as a badge on your profile, the NYT app encourages users to interact with it every day as fresh news quizzes arrive. This should not only get users more involved with the New York Times brand, but also play to Facebook's new activity metrics and perhaps make the app more visible to Facebook at large.

Second, the application ties in current newspaper content very well. After taking the quiz, users are given links to corresponding stories in the Times, and also given an option to study for the next day's quiz by reading up on today's top 5 stories on the New York Times web site. Unlike the Post, the Times app is specifically aimed at turning Facebook users into NYT readers.

Whether it works will largely depend on Facebook's appetite for current events. Turning news into a friendly competition with your friends, and making it easily digestible (i.e., just 5 stories per day, with multiple choice answers) were both good choices, in my opinion. And anything that raises the level of consciousness about current events among the world's youth is a good thing.

The Times says the reason they ask for registration is to be "able to offer people around the world free-of-charge access to news, reviews and more." But is it really necessary? Can't they do all those things without annoying users? Do to they get anything out of it? I don't think so.

I think the New York Times registration system is hurting them for a handful of reasons:

• It's annoying. On more than one occasion I have simply left the Times site for Google News to find a different source for the news I was trying to access because I couldn't be bothered by a registration wall. The NYT nixed TimesSelect fees in the hopes of exposing those 787,000 subscribers to advertising -- how many more page views would they get if they pulled down the registration wall and fully freed their content?
• It doesn't get you anything extra. The only incentive to join is that you can read the article you were trying to read in the first place. Instead of a gaining access to a service, the Times makes it feel like you're being punished.
• Does anyone sign up with real info? Since there is no email verification, there is really no reason for most people to use real information when signing up for the New York Times web site. I would guess that much of the information they capture is fake and thus useless to them. The site is also the most popular on BugMeNot, indicating that there are a number of people fed up enough to only use false info.

So what does the Times get out of all of this? User info that might be helpful for marketing and ad sales if it wasn't polluted by bogus entries, a few sign ups to their email newsletters (which are opt-in and unchecked by default on the sign up form, so probably not that many), and a bunch of pissed off readers. Is it worth it?

To be fair, the New York Times isn't the only newspaper that locks content behind a stupid registration wall. The Washington Post, the LA Times, and other major papers have the same annoying habit. There is a simple way for the New York Times to tear down their registration wall and still capture user data and encourage users to sign up for their newsletters.

They can begin by removing registration requirements on all of their content and adding some reason for people to register. The most likely path is to take a page from other news sites and add social features like comments, article rating, and blogs. Not only would the Times only require registration from users who are interested in registering, but they would be capturing information about their most engaged users. The Washington Post is actually halfway there -- they already offer a lot of added utility to users who register, but unfortunately, they still require registration simply to view much of their content.

Interesting, But Intentionally Limited

Sadly, though, the tool is also still somewhat limited. It doesn't for example, support Boolean operators (AND, OR, etc.) in queries. Adding additional search terms simply restricts searches to articles where both terms appear. There is no option to turn this around and make the query an 'or' search. All of this wouldn't be a problem if the app allowed users to then combine different feeds, but this isn't an option - though you could obviously use Yahoo Pipes or a similar product to combine these feeds yourself.

According to the Times, these limitations are intentional and meant to "keep the application simple and approachable."

If you are only interested in receiving updates about a very limited set of topics, then setting up a tab in Netvibes or iGoogle for a number of custom feeds is definitely an interesting proposition. On the other hand, you could also get similar and more customizable alerts from a wider range of publications through Google Alerts (though Google won't help you to find appropriate keywords) or a real-time service like Lazyfeed.

The NYTimes is a syndication partner of ReadWriteWeb.

Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider thought the move was a good one, writing, "Hats off to the company's web team for this smart move!" Other bloggers weren't so upbeat. While it seems that the NYT times took pains to make sure that comments from both ends of the political spectrum were represented for their main page selections -- often to one extreme or the other -- and comments were edited to fit the space, I do question the wisdom of giving reader commentary such prominence on the site's index page.

We've praised news sites for adding reader commenting as a feature to their web sites in the past, and we recently had kind words about the New York Times Facebook app. However, giving reader comments such a prominent position is dangerous. Readers of news sites (and blogs) go to those specific destinations to read news in the voice they expect -- not to see a public argument from commenters.

I would applaud an expansion of New York Times comments beyond blogs to general news stories -- I think commenting is great; it gives readers an outlet for instant response and keeps writers honest. But publishing comments on the main page, especially so prominently under the main story, seems like a bad idea. What do you think? Leave your thoughts in the comments below (we won't publish them on the main page, though!).

The app store hasn't updated yet so you'll have to grab it and manually update the app. Any stories you load with a web connection turned on will be saved automatically for offline reading. It's easy to customize the interface to highlight your favorite sections of the publication and we expect to be thankful for this app on our next flight.

If we had any suggestions they would be to put that movie ad in a more appropriate place and perhaps to include links to some of the several very interesting implementations of the new Times APIs, like this awesome elastic list article browser.

Check out the "browse by photos" feature, too. It's an all around good iPhone app, something we expect other publications to learn from. Offline readers will enjoy Instapaper's iPhone app as well, but that requires users to designate articles for reading from a regular web interface. Sometimes you're in a rush and the new Times app looks like it will deliver.

So how was the event received? In our estimation, it seems like another positive step forward for the NYT.

"The message is clear," wrote Times Open attendee Taylor Barstow. "The New York Times is, suddenly, a platform company."

He also offers:

"The New York Times recognizes the need for a news platform, and wants to fill that void. Their developers understand that Web 2.0 is about openness, and are committed to opening up The Times data to outsiders (whether or not the suits--and they do wear ridiculously nice suits--agree remains to be seen). They want to create a community of hackers around their APIs, and invite community feedback to drive future innovation. The Times executives should be supremely grateful for having employees with such vision at their organization."

Attendee Daniel Tunkelang sees promise in the Times Open strategy but still questions how far the NYT is willing to go:

"But there's a big catch: the New York Times is paranoid of diluting its brand equity by mixing up user contributions with their carefully vetted writing. As a result, all comments are moderated, and their aggregation of blogs linking to articles is a limited, proprietary system (Blogrunner). The New York Times wants to have its cake and eat it - all the benefits from users' active engagement without the costs of diluting their brand.

"I think their APIs make this possible, at least in theory."

But the big news coming out of the gathering - according to Allen Stern of CenterNetworks - is the release of a new API called TimesNewswire, which will "give developers access to live headlines. Attendee Kellan called this new API a New York Times firehose and noted, 'NewsWire API is the paper's stream of consciousness.'"

We definitely appreciate the direction that the NYT is taking. They seem genuinely dedicated to embracing openness and have created some momentum in that regard. We're especially looking forward to getting a chance to review the new API - which sounds like it may increase that momentum exponentially.

So where does the NYT get the motivation for all of this openness? For more on the thinking behind Times Open, watch the Yahoo Developer Network's interview with NYT's Derek Gottfrid, Senior Software Architect - the man behind the Times Open gathering. He offers some additional insight into the theory behind Times Open and hints at some of the development in the future - like how NYT will continue to leverage Hadoop.

NYTimes.com/Tech Editor Saul Hansell told Read/WriteWeb in an email that Blogrunner "is our answer to Techmeme, integrated with our main site. It is technology we've built ourselves, based on Blogrunner, a company we bought last year." Further, Hansell said that "unlike Google News and Techmeme, we aren't trying to prove machines can be better editors than people. We have a hybrid model, with Web Crawlers and Editors both helping find and ranks posts."

Blogrunner.com is a news aggregator that was acquired by the Times Company in 2005. NY Times has been building on the service since then - at one stage it was called "The Annotated New York Times". In February 2006 we wrote that Blogrunner offered an "interesting way to remix the NY Times and bring in external citations"; although we didn't think it was one of the top news aggregators at that point.

It's taken a long time for NY Times to integrate external news aggregation technology into their website, but kudos to them for doing it now. It provides opportunities for leading tech blogs - such as Techcrunch, PaidContent and of course Read/WriteWeb - to distribute their content to a wider audience. It also exposes NY Times readers to the more social - and arguably much faster - news cycle of leading blogs.

Blogrunner itself still seems behind Techmeme in some areas. For example Techmeme provides an easy-to-scan look at all related stories, on its frontpage. Whereas you only get the top story on Blogrunner's frontpage - you need to click the "related" link to see all the coverage. Also, and admittedly this could be seen as a pro rather than a con by mainstream readers, the publications tracked by Blogrunner are chosen by New York Times editors (thankfully R/WW seems to be among the chosen ones!).

So there is a strong editorial focus with Blogrunner, which NY Times states in its press release "enables readers to get a thoughtful overview of the day's top print and online coverage, all on one site." I think this is a sensible move, as a key part of the NY Times experience is its reputation for editorial quality - so Blogrunner should leverage that. As noted above, Google News and Techmeme by comparison are automated (although with both, the initial news sources were editorially selected).

All in all a great move by NY Times - tell us what you think in the comments. Will you use the NY Times Tech frontpage more because of this new feature?

Rogers Cadenhead has done the tabulation and found that Winer, and blogging, have indeed won. Sort of.

Today, a Google search for those terms brings up a blog higher than the New York TImes for Chinese exports (Blogging Stocks 19th vs. NYT 20th), Iraq War (a blog was 17th, NYT 20th) and Virginia Tech killings (Newsvine coverage of the AP's top stories of the year is 9th in Google vs. the Times at #30.) So blogs topped the Times in 3 out of 5 top stories.

Wikipedia, however, ranks higher than both blogs and wikis according to Candenhead. Also remarkable is that even as so much else has changed, Google remains as much a reasonable arbiter today as it was 5 years ago.

If Only It Were So Simple

What does it all mean? That things are a lot more complicated today than anyone might have expected five years ago. If you read the debate over the bet as originally posted it's remarkable how differently things have turned out. The vast majority of bloggers are not blogging professionally and many are making an impact on the news - but the 3 blogs that topped the Times in the Google results in question don't tell such a simple story. Two are stories from the AOL owned Blogging Stocks and one is from social news site Newsvine, now owned by MSNBC. So was Winer right about the triumph of the amateur after all?

The fact that Wikipedia beat everyone says something. Ultimately though, this is a story about SEO. If one person at the NYT was doing a better job of optimizing NYT pages for search engines this whole story could be turned on its head. Had the NYT not spent much of the last 5 years with a paywall around its content, how many more inbound links would these stories have seen and how would this contest look then? Will Google Knols end up unseating Wikipedia by pure privilege and ending up the winner of this entire contest?

Unsurprisingly, 5 years later the Winer vs. NYT bet brings up more questions than it answers.