beta.boston.com

You may have noticed a few changes on the Boston.com homepage today. 

For longtime Boston.com users, the most notable development is our new Boston.com logo – a more modern and compact design than the logo we’ve used since 1995. We’ve tested versions of this logo with our users and the end result was a bigger version of the same font, without the wave effect. We’re confident this graphic will translate more effectively across all our platforms – desktop, mobile, print and, eventually, on our newspaper delivery trucks.

At the same time, we’ve moved a few elements around and added a few new featured positions in the left and middle columns of the homepage. You’ll notice you can share content straight from our homepage more easily now. You can also easily follow Boston.com on Twitter and Facebook.

Our producers and product teams continually monitor a host of metrics on how our content is performing, including what is being shared and tweeted. So it was important to us to feature content going viral and promote easy sharing. For that reason, you will regularly see a “trending on social” content feature that highlights our most shared content.

These are just a few of the changes you’ll see on Boston.com in 2013, as we continue to expand our content, video offerings and social media connections. We simply want to provide you, our reader, with the best possible experience, across all your screens.

Jeff Moriarty
General Manager, Boston.com
Vice President, Digital Products, The Boston Globe

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What’s the news story that all my friends are talking about? Boston.com is now testing out a new ‘social sharing’ toolbar that will let you see what stories your Facebook friends are reading on Boston.com and in turn share what you are reading with them.

Only a small portion of our users will be randomly-selected to try this feature at first — and you’ll need to choose to use it. If you want to try it out, you can go to this page and turn on social sharing. Once you’re participating, you can invite your friends to share as well.

We hope this will be fun — knowing what your friends are reading, and discussing it with them (you can use a special comment box at the bottom of articles to do that).

After you opt-in, social sharing will share stories you read, photo galleries you view, and videos you watch on Boston.com with your Facebook friends, on Facebook and on Boston.com. (Not all pages on Boston.com are enabled for this feature yet).

You can turn sharing off for individual stories,  or entirely, and we’ll always pop-up a little notification to remind you.  Facebook will NOT show every single article you read to your friends, so you won’t be spamming them.  Even if your friends choose not to turn on social sharing, they’ll still be able to the read the stories on boston.com.

Why are we doing this?

There was a time when your whole social circle might read the same printed newspaper each morning and watched Walter Cronkite each evening. Social sharing may recapture a bit of that shared media diet by letting you read the same articles your friends have read. That could make it easy to turn reading the news on Boston.com into an experience where you connect with your friends.

Still have questions? Read the FAQ. And let us know what you think.

Joel Abrams, Senior Product Manager, Boston.com

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Are you a visual journalist with some serious coding chops? Are you a hacker with a passion for news, especially the data side of journalism? Do you love to craft experiences that help readers understand complicated and overwhelming amounts of information? Do you speak “journalism?”

We are hiring a data visualization programmer for the Boston Globe’s newsroom.

We need amazing things to happen with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We are looking for someone with a love for semantic, standards-driven web development and design. We want experience with data collection and analysis using APIs. We’re excited to find someone who cannot help the desire to create maps, charts and tools for data display. 

We want someone familiar with one or two front-end or back-end languages and frameworks and have a project or two that demonstrates an ability to take something from concept to completion … Extra credit for demonstrable experience with HTML5, CSS3 and responsive design.

This self-starter will get to cross-train, teach and share their skills with colleagues, collaborate with newsroom programmers, digital designers and site producers to build ambitious story presentations, and make cool stuff at one of the oldest, yet, forward-thinking news organizations in the country. For example, you could help users understand the health law mandate, reveal to Bostonians that they fish the eat in restaurants might be mislabeled, show the locations of deteriorating Massachusetts’s sea walls, and much more.

If the above describes you and you love the idea of being immersed in a fast-paced, buzzing newsroom, Apply! You are the person to do this job. Being a journalist for Boston.com and BostonGlobe.com is never boring. You will make a difference. Come work on the side of accountability.

Interested? You can apply here PLUS, email your info and links to examples of your work to me at mulligan at globe dot com. 

– Miranda
Design director, digital 

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We’re rolling out a new tool on some stories on Boston.com: “Raise Your Voice” is an easy-to-use “political messaging utility” enabling online readers to write public officials in response to issues they read about and care about.  Clicking the link in an article launches a dialog box in which readers can find their federal, state, and (soon) local elected representatives, write them, and then invite friends to add their voices as well.  You can write to the presidential candidates as well.

You can see the widget in action on stories about defense spending and foreclosures.

“We’re excited to give readers a chance to contact their elected officials, and interested to see what people think about our effort to streamline civic participation,” says Bennie DiNardo, Deputy Managing Editor for Multimedia at the Boston Globe.

“There has always been a connection between the news and civic action,” says Andrew Swayze, co-founder of Raise Your Voice, a Boulder, Colo.-based startup. “Legislators will tell you that half their mail comes in response to newspaper articles.  We’re making that link more direct, and in the process adding a new layer of interactivity for news site visitors.  We’re thrilled that Boston.com is beta-testing the tool.”

Let us know what you think.

Joel Abrams, Senior Product Manager, Boston.com

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By Joel Abrams, Senior Product Manager

We’ve just re-branded Boston.com’s venerable @BostonUpdate account as @BostonDotCom.  Existing followers should be migrated over automatically through the magic of Twitter.  If you don’t follow us already, here’s a handy follow button:

Why did we go with @BostonUpdate to begin with?  Well, when I created the account two-and-a-half years ago, few people thought Twitter would become a major force on the web, and I wasn’t thinking too deeply about branding.  People regularly asked me “will Twitter be around in a year?”

Also, a former employee of Boston.com had claimed the @BostonDotCom handle, forgotten the password — and her email account had been deactivated.  The fine folks at @twittermedia helped us recently to reclaim the account.

I’ll also take this opportunity to point out that with the launch of BostonGlobe.com, the @BostonGlobe account is also much more active, and so are several new Twitter accounts for the Globe.  If all that is too serious for you, then take a chance on @BostonRandom (and all our accounts are listed at boston.com/tools/twitter).

(Source: Boston.com)

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By Lisa DeSisto, GM and CAO, Boston.com

We’ve declared our independence from pop-unders.

One of the biggest challenges for Boston.com is balancing the user experience and our need to drive advertising revenue. Too many ads/interruptions and you scare away users. Too few ads and you don’t generate enough revenue to run a successful business.

However, one ad format drove the largest number of complaints from you, our users: the annoying, “don’t make me close another,” pop-under. So effective today, Boston.com has officially suspended them. Sorry, if you need to flatten your belly or lower your bills, you won’t have pop-unders to help you anymore.

Next up: addressing your second biggest complaint, de-cluttering the homepage. Watch for that later this summer.

And if you’ve got any other constructive feedback on how Boston.com can better surprise and delight you, we’d love to hear from you.

Bye-bye pop-unders, you brought us to the dance but we’re leaving with a pencil ad.

@BostonLisaD

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