The New York Times company has launched a new application that makes it easy to save web links and notes and synchronize them between multiple devices. ShifD has several components.

There's a web page where you can add notes in three categories: Links, places, and notes. You can also add a "ShifD This" browser bookmarklet that lets you instantly save any web page you're visiting to the Links category.

You can also run ShifD as an application using the Desktop client built on Adobe AIR. And you can also access and update your ShifD information from a mobile phone. There's a mobile version of the web page optimized for the iPhone and other small screen devices. Or you can send notes to your ShifD account via text messages.

ShifD is currently in public beta. The SMS updating feature isn't available yet, but should be rolled out within the next few weeks.

[via Mobility Site]

The New York Times has launched a nifty browser for reading old newspapers. Like really old. The company has scanned copies of every issue from 1851 through the end of 1922 and put the results online as a series of PDF files. That means you can read stories about the Civil War, World War I, and the sinking of the titanic just as they originally appeared a hundred years ago. Except, you know, on a computer screen and not newsprint.

Boing Boing reports there's also a publicly available API, which means you can create your own browser or other application that will pull together old newspaper issues.

The New York Times has launched a redesigned technology news page. The old school paper has partnered with some new school content partners, adding stories from third party sources like IDG and PaidContent. But probably the most interesting feature is that little column we highlighted in red. It's called "Technology Headlines From Around the Web," and it's being labeled a Techmeme killer. (Remember when people used to talk about Technorati killers? Ahh, those were the days).

That new columns is powered by BlogRunner, a news aggregator that the Times snatched up last year. The service does a pretty decent job of figuring out what stories people are talking about, posting those headlines and a list of blogs and websites linking to those stories. The New York Times/BlogRunner are hardly the only game in town when it comes to news/blog aggregation.

But here's why the paper might have a leg up on Technorati, Techmeme, or any other site that starts with the word "tech." A huge number of people already read the New York Times every day. You can't really say the same about Techmeme. It's a great place to find interesting stories, but as far as we can tell, it's primary audience is bloggers looking for good story ideas.

On the other hand, if you take a look at the screenshot above, you'll see that there's at least one major difference between the stories you find using BlogRunner and Techmeme. BlogRunner includes news from a lot of professional news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and Time Magazine. In fact, there seem to be more old media types getting links than new media websites and blogs.

[via TechCrunch]

The New York Times and other papers are facing a conundrum. On the one hand, people are canceling their paper subscriptions left and right. That's largely because they can get the news online for free. And when papers like the Times try to charge people for access to web content many readers just look elsewhere for their news.

Enter the brave new world of online advertising. Newspapers generally aren't making the kind of money from online ads as they did from print ads and subscriptions. But advertising revenue is going up. And if the Times can build the kind of brand loyalty online using Web 2.0 techniques as it did offline using Print 1.0, the company could be rolling in dough. Or at least it could stay afloat.

Earlier this year, the New York Times announced plans to open up its archives and make available articles that had previously only been available to paying customers. The company also embraced search engine optimization techniques, pushing its web traffic way up (even though the same move now means that Google will often return a 15 year old newspaper article as a top search result even when it's not the most relevant article by a long shot).

Now it looks like the paper is taking a major step to engage users by putting reader comments on the front page of the paper. Right under the photo of the day's top stories. Is this act alone going to save the newspaper industry? Probably not. But it shows that the mainstream media are learning a few tricks from blogs. It's only fair. Every now and again bloggers actually learn a thing or two from mainstream media, like how to cover the who, what, when, where, why, and how of a good news story.

[via Silicon Alley Insider]