Sometimes a really interesting piece of software slips through the cracks here at Download Squad head office, and we miss covering it when it was first released. Sometimes when that happens, it's worth going back and pointing out what we missed. Though it was released back in February, we have somehow up until now neglected to mention the experimental New York Times Article Skimmer, and for that we feel shame.

Silliness aside, the Article Skimmer is an alternative way to experience the New York Times' content online, and in my opinion it is a better analog for reading a physical newspaper than most news websites are offering. Since you can't reasonably display the same amount of information on a web page as you can on a physical page of newsprint, the only way to make scanning for stories more efficient is to optimize the display for that purpose, and that's exactly what the Article Skimmer does.

The interface gives you a simple five-by-four grid that fills the page showing headlines and very short summaries for the top stories in the section that you select. Thumbnail images accompany many stories, and if there are more stories than fit on the page, you can quickly flip forward and back between pages. There are also keyboard shortcuts like the obvious arrow keys that will navigate you up and down through the different sections of the paper, and a couple of less obvious shortcut keys. Holding down the 's' key (for section) will show numbers beside each section -- type the number of the section you'd like to view, and press Enter all while still holding the 's' key to jump straight to that section. Hold the 'a' key (for article) and use the arrow keys to navigate the highlight to the article you'd like to view, then press Enter while still holding 'a'. As always, you'll need a free account with the New York Times to view most of the articles.

The announcement for the Article Skimmer notes that it doesn't yet have an official name, but that its purpose was to try to replicate the feeling of spreading out the Sunday times on a table while maybe eating brunch and skimming through the stories. I think this might be the closest we'll get to the tangible feeling of having a huge amount of articles right at our fingertips only a few inches away from each other.

Venerable New York Times technology columnist David Pogue recently posted a list of his productivity tips and tricks that allow him to be uber productive. The list is good in that he tries to generalize and talk about ways of doing things instead of specific software or hardware. For example, Pogue talks about using macro utilities instead of specifically naming utilities like Quicksilver for the Mac or Launchy for Windows.

While some of his tools seem somewhat outdated, it's not a surprise given the time investment he has in them. And really, although we all to a greater or lesser extent have a case of "shiny object syndrome" and need to try the latest and greatest of everything, the truth is that if a tool is working, the most productive thing to do is to just leave it alone.

Of particular note (at least for me) is Pogue's first tip that he uses text expansion software. It's not so much that he uses it, but how he uses it that intrigues me; Pogue has expansion words configured for even the smallest word. For example, to type the word "the" he needs only type the letter "t". That's some serious configuration, but I can definitely see how it could be very useful once in the mindset of always using abbreviations.

What do you think of Pogue's tips, and what is your best productivity tip?

Mixx, a young social news site similar to Digg, just scored a button under "SHARE" next to the articles on the NY Times site. But this is hardly important news, so what's the big deal?

The Digg-clone is only about half a year old, and as you can see in the picture on the right, only the the most established of social sites get a mention. Yet del.icio.us, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Fark, and other bigger, older, and more established sites haven't made the cut.

This NYT-Mixx button is money for the young company, and you can bet you'll hear (or read) the word "Mixx" getting mentioned more often in the future. Now, in order to complete the site's initiation process into the world of established bookmarking sites, we need to turn its name into a verb

ex: Did we Mixx this article? Yes, we love Mixxing stories (for the record, DLS has no official preference as to whether or not its members like to "Mixx" posts).

The New York Times' Bits blog reports that tomorrow, Bill Gates will be unveiling Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 in the company's first unpretentious bid to dominate the PBX phone system space. Only one problem with the Times' angle: Office Communications Server is not a PBX system. It certainly supports the use of VoIP phones and software like Office Communicator, allowing you to do a lot of what a PBX system does. But VoIP alone a phone system does not make.

Not only that, but OCS doesn't support connecting to public telephone network lines without outside media gateway equipment--which means it will work great next to your phone system, filling in some important functionality blanks like desktop conferencing, but probably can't replace the old phone system altogether. Well, at least not yet. That said, what can OCS do?

Office Communications Server uses SIP (session initiation protocol) to set up all types of collaborative media streams on behalf of an enterprise user group-- supported media types include instant messaging, file transfer, VoIP calling, video-conferencing, and desktop sharing and collaboration. Plus, OCS is tied to Microsoft's Active Directory, allowing you to use your existing security and directory from your Windows network.

But if you want to call for a pizza using the Microsoft Office Communicator VoIP client, you'll still need a phone system, or at least have your Office Communications Server connected to one via SIP. We invite the excitable folks at the New York Times to calmly read about all the mature, competing products to whom OCS is only now catching up: Cisco MeetingPlace, WebEx, Scopia, and, yes, to some extent, even Skype. Then again, nothing's really new until Microsoft announces it.

As of midnight tonight the New York Times pay to view Select Service is no longer. The Times began the subscription service exactly 2-years ago and charged users $49.95 a year or $7.95 a month for the ability to access specific content online. Overall they managed to get 227,000 paid subscribers which made for a profit of close to $10 million a year.

In their announcement the Times said more users were now coming to the site via search engines and links on other sites than they were at the service's launch. These users couldn't get to the content (since they were not subscribers) but were unlikely to pay for it just to check out one piece on content. By allowing everyone access, the New York Times stands to dramatically increase their page views and make more money in advertising revenue than they were off of subscription fees. For those subscribers who have already shelled out some cash for Time Select the NYT is planning to reimburse them on a prorated basis.

What do you think about the Times decision to drop their subscriber service? Could this be the beginning of the end for subscriber based web content?

[via TechCrunch]

Personalized webpages are all business when it comes to the New York Times personalized My Times page.

Like other start pages, Netvibes, iGoogle, PageFlakes, MyYahoo and Windows Live, MyTimes allows users to pull in all of their important everyday RSS news and build a single resource. Widgets like weather, Flickr, stock quotes and crosswords can also be added to pages. Sections can be dragged around and reorganized like the other offerings as well.

Where MyTimes differs is that readers can choose to have their pages set up by Times journalists for news and entertainment. Offering a first hand look into their sources of information.

The New York Times ran a lengthy article on emoticons this weekend. It's a must read for anyone who can decipher this symbol ~(_8^(I), or for anyone who can't but would like to.

While the Times gives a brief history of the emoticon, with the first modern usage traced back to 1982, the juicy bits involve the creep of emoticons from casual conversations into the professional arena. For example, if you're writing someone to let them know that a business deal worth thousands or millions of dollars is about to fall through, a frowny face just isn't going to have the same impact as a phone call.

We're betting that a lot of Download Squad readers grew up with emoticons and don't have to turn their head sideways to decipher any but the most complex smileys. But have you noticed yourself wanting to type a quick smiley, wink, or frown into a message to your boss?

Given that sarcasm and other nuances are hard to get across using nothing but text, emoticons offer a sort of shortcut. And when you're typing a note to a friend in a hurry, that's probably OK. But sometimes it's worth taking the long way to say something that's worth saying.

What do you think? Are emoticons the downfall of human civilization as we know it, an evolutionary step in written communication, or something in between?

We caught up with one of our favorite tech columnists, David Pogue, the distinguished and irreverent NY Times personal technology guru, as well as author of the Missing Manual series, and not as well known, Emmy winning CBS News correspondent.

We wanted to find out his personal views on a variety of matters and how he manages to produce so much material, including weekly product video reviews, a weekly print column, State of the Art (also provided as a podcast), daily posts to his blog, Pogue's Pages, his computer book series, the Missing Manual, etc.

Does he have a staff of ten or more people who REALLY do all the work? With all the tech products he reviews, what can't he live without? Who's the girl in the bikini in his video review? Does he like old people? In short, what's his mojo? Read on for our chat with David Pogue!

The New York Times has a dedicated reader program that has been in open beta since September 27th that allows users to read the Times on their computer in a way that more closely matches the experience of reading the dead-tree newspaper. Although I'm not a huge newspaper fan, I downloaded this application and it really is enjoyable to use. The New York Times Reader software relies on Microsoft's new .Net framework 3.0, which can make the installation take a bit of time if you don't already have it installed. I already had .Net 3.0 installed, so the reader installed in about two minutes.

Once it launched, it failed to synchronize with the server, but shutting it completely down (including the system tray icon that stays running) and restarting it fixed that problem. The layout is well optimized for reading, splitting content into rows of a reasonable width. It also does a very good job of dynamically optimizing the text layout based on how large the window is sized. Ads are included in an unobtrusive way, and I've found that when reading in a smaller Times Reader window, ads are removed to make more room for content.

The download (and use of the software) requires a free NYT account.

Thanks to Download Squad tipster Bob Rudis for the link.

Yesterday's New York Times included an, um, interesting article by John Markoff about the next generation of the web. He says that computer scientists and start-ups want to "add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide--and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion." He says their effort is "referred to as Web 3.0." That's nice, John, but why does your article have everyone who actually knows what they're talking about scratching their heads? Everyone who's been paying attention will identify that new "layer of meaning" as what people have been happy calling the semantic web for a few years now, but nobody but Markoff, and maybe a few overenthusiastic marketers, are calling it Web 3.0, and that bit about reasoning "in a human fashion"? Well, AI isn't new to computer science, and Hollywood got over it five years ago. I'm not sure what Markoff's excuse is.

Predictably, the blogosphere is all over the Web 3.0 meme, with notable responses from Nick Bradbury who says "The Semantic Web may happen, but if it does, it's going to be a helluva lot messier than the architects would like," and ex-Microsoftie Robert Scoble who proposes "Web 2007" as a much more hypeworthy name, Tim O'Reilly ("I was surprised to see Markoff referring to this as "Web 3.0", when that very fact is the heart of what we've been calling Web 2.0."), and, of course, Dave Winer.

Just like iTunes did for file sharing music, Warner Bros. is going to start selling movies and TV online. While this is clearly an effort to legitimize the whole download yer entertainment thing, what's interesting is the use of BitTorrent as the tech behind the downloads. I don't think it's unusual though, as BitTorrent's technological solution to moving packets around is quite clever. It's a perfect tech for moving large files at high speeds, as would be needed. Besides, the prevailing theory has been if you offer a way for people to use BitTorrent (or any download system) legally, they'd use it. I'll admit I just don't bother looking for stuff on torrent sites just for the extra hassle it entails. Now what was that about the next version of OS X using BitTorrent? Hm...

[Via TechMeme]