1. Call out Politicians

In my opinion, one of the most important roles of a newspaper is to keep public figures honest. The Globe does that, on occasion, such as when the Globe called out Mayor Menino to push for MBTA reform. I’d love to see the Globe take a more active role in pushing politicians to pursue positive policy change. A great start would be having a section that lists all the politicians, their campaign promises, and what they’ve done to fulfill those promises.

2. Promote Local Bloggers

As someone who received the Boston Globe bump, I know first hand that the Globe does try and promote the little guys. They could do a better job, by creating an archive of bloggers linked to before (to preserve the link juice), but being featured on the Globe’s homepage is a start and can be a launching point for Boston bloggers. I’ve heard from many other bloggers who wish their local paper had a similar feature, so kudos to the Globe for sharing some of their massive traffic with Boston bloggers who also help drive traffic to the Globe’s site.

3. Easy to Read Design

I’ve heard from a lot of people that they hate the Boston Globe’s design. Don’t count me as one of those people. For all their faults, in my eyes their web site’s design is not one of them. Sure it’s a bit cluttered, but it’s a newspaper. They have tons of content they want to showcase and in my opinion, their design accomplishes that without completely overwhelming readers. Plus, when you click through to a single article their typography and layout is spot-on and makes for a pleasurable read.

The only change I’d like to see happen is a section that showcases local news. I know the Globe does write about local stories, but they’re often buried out of sight off the homepage. Having a Boston stories section would help the Globe and Bostonians stay in touch with what’s going on in the City of Boston.

4. Social Media and Community Building

These two areas are places where the Globe gets kudos for effort, but they could stand to improve both areas. A few months back, the Globe rolled out a community feature, where commenters can create a profile describing themselves a little bit. Looking through some comments, I’m not even sure if this feature is still around, but at least they’re trying to give commenters a persistence presence.

An area where the Globe really excels though, is not just using social media to promote their articles, but more so using social media to promote news within their articles. During the MBTA crash at Government Center, the Globe had a running Twitterstream that showed the latest tweets coming in about the crash. Knowing that they couldn’t possibly match the real-time tweets, the Globe reported as much as they could and also gave readers the option to view the stream to get up to the minute updates.

It’s great to see the Globe reach out to the community for some citizen journalism, though the un-filtered stream was filled with duplicates and even a few tweets that shouldn’t have been there. It’ll likely never happen, but I would love to see the Globe allow commenters to link to their sites. It would provide a background on the commenter and help drive traffic to good commenters’ sites. And if they use Disqus, any SEO worries could be averted.

5. Humor

As yesterday’s crossword puzzle shows, the Globe does have a humorous side. OK, sure, one of my main critiques against the Globe is not focusing on the truly important news, but hey, everyone could use a little laugh in their day.

None of these positive aspects of the Boston Globe are perfect, but I feel they’re ahead of the game compared to most mainstream newspapers. Hopefully they’ll take some of the advice here into consideration. Instead of just ragging on the Globe, my efforts going forward will be on ways to improve the paper. Having the best newspaper possible benefits all Bostonians. That doesn’t mean I won’t call out the Globe in the future, but I’ll try to temper it by also offering ways to improve.

What are some areas you think the Globe does well? Where could they improve?

What Changed?

The new design features a fixed header that stays at the top wherever you go, allowing you to quickly search through the site, access the archives, send me an e-mail, subscribe to the blog feed, or connect with me on one of my favorite social media sites. My intent was to move from a huge header that simply looked good to one that took up little real estate but was useful. To that extent I think the new slim, fixed header is a big success. But let me know how you feel, I’m always open to feedback!

Some of you may be disappointed that I got rid of the old header with the great Apple keyboard shot, but it was time for a change. Sorry Dave I’m afraid I can’t do that.

Other changes were dropping the sidebar widgets to the bottom of the page, allowing me to give the main content a much wider space. Doing so lets me embed full size YouTube videos and wide images into posts. As you can tell, I really went for usability and functionality here rather than looks. The look itself is really simple and clean and draws the focus back onto the content.

On a sidenote, you’d think the new wider look would break on an 800 x 600 resolution, but that’s not quite the case. By dropping the sidebar below the content the design scales gracefully to a low resolution.

I’m still working on re-adding some of the widgets I had before (most notably the Scribnia and Friendfeed widgets) but otherwise it’s all done!

Before & After

Here’s a snap of the before look (note, it’s not an exact replica as I deleted the old look, this one is from an older local copy I had but it’s basically the same):

Old header, body, and sidebar

Now let’s take a look at how this section looks in the new design:

Oooh...more room for content!

Another section I wanted to tweak up was the Thesis teasers section. I felt they were a bit small so I widened them out and made each teaser fall on its own line. Personally, it makes it easier to scan through the teasers and archives and allows for a bigger thumbnail image.

Here’s how the teasers used to look:

Effective, but can they be improved?

Looks OK, but in the move to the wider main content column, they looked a bit scrunched up and out of place. In the new design each teaser falls on its own line:

What a tease...

Another section I felt needed a good deal of revamping was the comments and footer. Here’s a look at the old comments and footer section:

Comments and footers, pretty bland.

Quite bland, eh? Let’s take a look at the new comments and footers, which for those of you using new versions of Safari or Firefox feature lots of easy to look at rounded corners.

Roundy boxes.

And here’s the comments:

New Comments with more rounded corners

That’s about the bulk of the changes. There’s a few more tweaks and touchups here and there but the majority of the look’s covered above. If you find anything out of place or have any suggestions or questions on how I did something, feel free to ask. Hope you all enjoy the new design!

Thanks to eelke dekker for the HTML vs. CSS lego figures.

in the mill building right next to the river, look for the Museum under the smokestack

Love it! We eventually figured out that one girl in our randomly assembled group at the parking lot entrance actually knew where it was, so we followed her lead. Once we got inside, we were all awed by the cool industrial stuff in the museum, from 100 year old bicycles to old engines, watches, and a very old school and very cool fire pump that may or may not have been pulled by horses (note to self, do not touch anything).

As for the actual networking and product showcase event, well it rocked! Met great people and witnessed some very innovative technology products. Without further ado, here’s the three innovative products I enjoyed the most.

Top Three Innovative Products at Mass Innovation 3

In no particular order, here’s three products that I found useful, innovative, or just plain cool and slick.

1. Chatterbox

I met one of the members of Chatterbox at Tuesday’s tweetup event, where I heard a little about Chatterbox, but seeing the software live in person left me even more impressed.

Chatterbox [@ChatterBoxApp] is a “collaboration platform for social media teams and power users”. In essence, it’s a piece of software that allows you to pull information from your social networks, organize it, delegate it and share it easily. Todd Clayton from Chatterbox was nice enough to hook me up with a beta invite so look out for some hands on analysis in the coming days.

2. World Computing Grid

Remember SETI@home? It’s the largest distributed computing system in the world. SETI stands for the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence and a few years back I used to run their SETI@home program all the time in the hopes of helping them find some aliens (what self-admitted geek wouldn’t help with that cause?).

Well, IBM’s World Community Grid is also a distributed computing system (meaning it splits up computer tasks and sends them out to computers around the world to crunch the data, then sends it back to the home server). They differ from SETI@home because the WCG is really a platform that allows researchers and organizations to implement a distributed computing system into their projects.

Any research project can submit a request to get free help from IBM setting up a grid to crunch their project’s data (submit a research proposal here). It’s a really cool system and is extremely customizable. You can set it to run in the background and utilize a certain percentage of CPU power, or simply run when your computer is idle as a screensaver.

The list of research projects utilizing the World Community Grid includes:

• Help Conquer Cancer
• The Clean Energy Project
• Nutritious Rice for the World
• FightAIDS@Home
• and more research projects
3. Canson PaperShow

The product that was most likely to make peoples jaws drop. In essence, it’s a piece of paper that you can draw on and it instantly gets transferred to your computer screen. It’s designed for digital flipcharts and interactive presentations.

From the piece of paper, you can select colors, brush styles, and other editing tools. Yes, from the piece of paper. Canson Papershow has tiny microscopic points embedded into each piece of paper. Inside the pen, there is a tiny camera which transmits data via bluetooth to a USB dongle connected to your computer. It’s really quite seamless and needs to be seen to be truly appreciated.

To that end, here’s two videos showing Papershow in action:

Canson Papershow is available now from Staples for $199.99.

Thanks to all the presenters at Mass Innovation Nights #3 for a great time. All your products were innovative and cool, these three just caught my eye and fit my interests the most. And thanks to Bobbie Carlton [@bobbiec] for putting everything together!

Sign up for #MIN4, held on July 8th today. And here’s the wrap-up post from the Mass Innovations blog.

So, to all you feed readers, today is one of those days when you should for sure click through and come check out the site’s new look and feel. To be honest, the new look and feel isn’t drastically different. I kept much of the basic look intact but did increase the post font size and expanded the post width and the sidebar width a bit, giving the blog a bit more room to breathe and leaving more space for wider images and video. Also dropped a few plugins and widgets and added a few new ones.

New Stuff

• Added Google Friend Connect widget
• Added FriendFeed widget
• Added new social media icons
• Added BackType Connect to import external comments

There’s still a bunch of things I want to upgrade and tweak, for instance the header image and the photos section. For now though, it’s a nice upgrade that’ll free up some maintenance time and make for an easier read.

Let me know what you think of the new look and feel!