Slate is looking for an editorial assistant in its New York City office. The assistant's primary responsibility will be to provide administrative and editorial help to Slate's culture editors. There will also be opportunities for occasional writing.

Ideal candidates will be organized, diplomatic, and have excellent writing skills. They will also demonstrate good editorial judgment and wide cultural interests. Some editorial experience preferred. This is a 12-month contract position, without benefits.

Yikes. We know the media industry is taking a blow right now, but contractually obligating an assistant to stay in that role for a year without even offering them a basic healthcare plan? Maybe it's a big experiment on the publication's part to see if Obamacare really works for 20-somethings with liberal art degrees.

On Wednesday, Village Voice Media gave its sex blogger Jamie Peck notice that the racy sex-news site she'd edited for eight months, Naked City New York—the curiously unheraled existence of which was exposed in by The Observer in December—would sort of roll over and go to sleep without ever reaching the mind-blowing climax of a public launch. 

News of the sites' demise came, as all news does, in the form of a tweet—this, on Ms. Peck's feed:

Wow, just found out NakedCity is dead. If anyone's been thinking of trying to hire me to write/edit for them, now would be a good time.

Her Los Angeles counterpart, AV Flox, proprietress of Naked City Los Angeles, didn't respond to a request for comment, but her site hasn't been updated since Tuesday and may have suffered the same fate.

In a web chat, Ms. Peck, who posted 519 posts during the New York blog's lengthy test run, told us VVM's director of new media Bill Jensen broke the news to her via email. (Men.) "He said the budget had been cut again and Naked City hadn't made it," she wrote.

According to Quantcast, monthly traffic for the sites has been growing, topping out at around 7,000 page views, sparse but respectable for a pair of websites that were still slinking around on the DL.

Though disappointed, Ms. Peck said the experience had been a good one. "I'd never been the sole editor of a blog before (barring branding stuff I've done for Converse), editing other people, making an editorial schedule, etc., so that was definitely a good experience." She refused to disclose her salary—"that would be tacky"—but did mention one perk.

"It was fun to watch the review copies of pornos I got in the mail with my boyfriend," she wrote. "We both have a pretty gross sense of humor."

VVM Director of New Media Bill Jensen hasn't responded to an email seeking comment, but we will update when we hear back. 

agell [at] observer.com | @aarongell

It is symbolic that the Met's media center overlooks the entire house. Here, on the sixth floor, is the jumble of offices and studios responsible for the company's weekly live radio broadcasts, satellite radio channel, subscription audio and video streaming service, house-produced recordings and films, and, last but very much not least, its "Live in HD" movie theater broadcasts, the Met's signature initiative. Ms. Bongiovanni, 42, the company's assistant manager for media, is in charge of making it all happen: digitizing the archives, producing the broadcasts and expanding the Met's reach all over the world.

"I don't think any of us had any idea how successful it would be," she said of the Live in HD program in an interview in her office on Saturday afternoon, during a performance of Don Carlo, the season's first radio broadcast. The climaxes of Ms. Bongiovanni's weeks are invariably these Saturday matinee performances, and she's gotten used to a six-day work schedule.

"It was a big piece of his vision," she said, referring to Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager and her mentor. "We talked early on about building a media bridge out to our audience and that's the charge. How do we reach our audience, without waiting for them to come here? How do we get to them, in every way that they're currently consuming content?"

There are seven assistant managers at the Met, the level of the Met's hierarchy just below Mr. Gelb and James Levine, the music director. When Ms. Bongiovanni came to the Met in 2006, it was as director of media; there was no higher position. That media has been given an assistant manager spot and seen its staff enlarged even during difficult financial times for the company shows its crucial importance at Mr. Gelb's Met.

The attention that the company has given to media is paying off. After starting largely from scratch four years ago, this season a dozen live, high-definition broadcasts will go out to 1,500 theaters in 46 countries; last season, the broadcasts became profitable for the first time, making $8 million for the Met, which has struggled with deficits in its $300 million budget. "It's a big place with a big budget," Ms. Bongiovanni said, "but every little bit helps."

Ms. Bongiovanni grew up in Syracuse and went to Colgate College. She graduated in 1990 and moved to New York to pursue a master's at NYU in the literature of medieval mysticism, aiming toward a career in publishing. But she had grown interested in opera during college, and when she graduated, she saw an ad in the paper for a spot as production assistant in the Met's radio department. She got the job.

Mr. Gelb was at the time the executive producer of the Met's television broadcasts, and he took Ms. Bongiovanni under his wing. She left to work for him at the artist-management agency CAMI, where he was in charge of film projects. When Sony bought CAMI Video in 1993 and Mr. Gelb became head of Sony Classical, she became a producer at the label, coordinating recording, production and post-production.

It was an ideal fit. "I'm not a creative person, but I love being in a creative environment," she said. And the '90s were the last good time to be in the classical record industry; Sony, especially, was propelled by Mr. Gelb's bold, controversial crossover projects. It was also a peak of the "old" Met's media outreach: almost two dozen live radio broadcasts per season as well as several televised operas. In the early years of the new millennium, though, funding started to dry up, along with ticket sales, and TV broadcasts dwindled to one or two a season.

"That changed very quickly when we got here," Ms. Bongiovanni said. Mr. Gelb was appointed general manager in 2004 (his predecessor, Joseph Volpe, was retiring at the end of the 2005-06 season), and she joined him in the beginning of 2006. "The media department had its set thing that it was doing, and doing well, but it wasn't growing."

While the basic structures were in place for radio and video broadcast, Ms. Bongiovanni and her colleagues, many recruited from Sony, scrambled to digitize enough archival performances to provide steady content for their satellite radio channel, which launched on Sirius (now Sirus XM) at the start of the 2006-07 season. Though she said that the channel is not yet profitable, the Met looks at it as an investment.

"The archival stuff is not necessarily a revenue generator," she said, "but what it does do is, every time we preserve a broadcast, it has a life going forward. Airing it on Sirius is only the start of that life. We're building assets that have a future-commercial outlets, noncommercial outlets, PBS, home video, subscription, licensing for international television, and on and on. We look at it very much as building this incredible library of assets. In that sense, the future potential is significant."

The HD broadcasts are not without their difficulties and critics. The Met's new-media initiatives were made possible by a 2006 deal with the company's unions, but now that the profitability of these projects has been proved, the renegotiation of that deal this spring may be divisive. Though the HD broadcasts have been a success by many measures, it's not entirely clear that they are greatly expanding the demographics of operagoing. And some regional companies have complained that they are losing audience members to the broadcasts, which are cheaper and more casual than "in-person" opera.

Other major opera companies, including London's Royal Opera and La Scala in Milan, are also starting to explore live broadcasts, but Ms. Bongiovanni said that the quality of the Met's work, as well as its having been there first, would keep them successful.

"It's out there," she said. "We watch it. We haven't seen it affect us. For me, I focus on what we're doing. We're putting out a level of quality that is unparalleled and due to that we have a very loyal audience. I don't think about competition so much."

But competition will doubtless affect the Met's media position in coming years, particularly as the number and nature of venues expand. The chief executive of the Royal Opera said this summer that he wanted live performances broadcast directly into homes. The Met's Internet subscription download and streaming service, Met Player, is not currently profitable but will make this possible as more people connect to the Internet through their televisions, on which the high-quality video and sound of the "Live in HD" broadcasts can be approximated. In the not too distant future you may be able to watch any Met performance, live, from your living room. Or on your phone. "We want to be flexible in a way that will allow us to grow in ways that we haven't thought of," Ms. Bongiovanni said.

Though she gave ample credit to her colleagues at the Met, there are reasons that Mr. Gelb has kept Ms. Bongiovanni by his side for almost twenty years, dealing with his most important priorities. "I work incredibly hard," she said, "and there's a huge amount of trust that's built up over the years. I know the level he's striving for, and I know the work he's trying to accomplish, so I work very hard to do that."

"Mia is a first rate producer and administrator," Mr. Gelb said in statement. "She skillfully manages one of the most important departments at the Met, while adroitly handling the wide range of extroverted personalities that inhabit our busy theater."

As we walked to the elevator, there was a door shut midway down the institutional, concrete-lined hallway. Opening it, we were suddenly confronted with a small crowd of middle-aged and elderly women. Through an open door on the left, there was the incongruous sight of the plush, golden-lit interior of the Met's auditorium.

Ms. Bongiovanni explained that during performances, female audience members on the Family Circle level share the media department's bathroom. It's one of those unfriendly but endearing quirks oddly common in the corners of aging theaters, and it was somehow a reminder of the goal of Peter Gelb's Met: the transition from analog to digital, from old to new. It's a transition that will determine the future of opera, and it's happening on the sixth floor.

Ms. Bongiovanni is making that future possible, but, busy dealing with the technical details of countries, formats and languages, she laughs off the question of where she thinks opera will be, media-wise, in ten years.

"I don't spend a lot of time thinking about that stuff," she said. "I just make sure we're on the air."

In a new book called The Facebook Effect (Simon & Schuster), erstwhile Fortune writer David Kirkpatrick recounts the anecdote as part of a richly detailed history of the company and its adolescent founder. Mr. Zuckerberg granted full access to the author, and Mr. Kirkpatrick makes good use of it, developing a well-paced narrative documenting how an introverted son of a dentist and a psychologist from Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., created an Internet behemoth with a few friends, becoming in a few years the kind of tech guru whose sandal-clad feet are now worshiped by computer scientists, engineers and venture capitalists from around the world.

"Modesty of ambition has never characterized successful leaders at Facebook," writes Mr. Kirkpatrick.

The site may merely seem like a facilitator of collegiate-type socializing, a good way of showing off vacation photos and snooping on your ex-lovers. But Mr. Zuckerberg zealously believes that it is also a powerful evolutionary tool, destined to alter human behavior, ranging from love and governance to human consciousness and world peace. 

More >> Facebook's Embarassing Youth

As a sophomore at Harvard, Mr. Zuckerberg, a computer science major, tinkered in his spare time with ways of reducing campus life into simple dichotomies. One of his first big hits at Harvard was a program called Facemash, which allowed his classmates to compare photos of two of their peers and vote on which was hotter. Mr. Zuckerberg was eventually reprimanded by university officials for uploading pictures without individuals' consent.

He was undeterred. While past generations of self-obsessed college students justified their navel-gazing by quoting the Oracle of Delphi, "Know Thyself," Mr. Zuckerberg anticipated a fundamental shift in young people's philosophical needs: "Show Thyself." Given the right environment, everyone would share.

ON FEBRUARY, 4, 2004, Mr. Zuckerberg went live with the first version of Facebook, which was essentially a stripped-down way for Harvard students to show off their identities (already polished to a high sheen via the Harvard admissions process) in a digital directory of their peers. It was also an efficient way for a guy with a computer to figure out such things as, say, which classes the hot girls were taking. "I know it sounds corny," Mr. Zuckerberg told a campus newspaper around this time, "but I'd love to improve people's lives, especially socially."

And so a multibillion-dollar global empire was born. Mr. Kirkpatrick argues convincingly that Mr. Zuckerberg's idea was hardly unique. At the time, various entrepreneurs at campuses around the country were working on similar projects. But Mr. Kirkpatrick details the sequence of events and decisions by which Mr. Zuckerberg and his friends repeatedly outmaneuvered their competition, along the way dropping out of Harvard, moving to Palo Alto, raising capital, throwing parties, writing code, trashing rental houses, watching Tom Cruise movies and growing the company into a global platform. By January of 2010, Mr. Kirkpatrick reports, 11.6 percent of all the time spent in America on the Internet was spent on Facebook. That's more than double the time on Google.

More >> What Facebook Can Reveal About Our Private Lives (With 78 Percent Accuracy)

Throughout it all, Mr. Zuckerberg comes across not only as an insightful, strong-willed entrepreneur but also as a bit of a slob. At one point in the book, his mom apologizes on behalf of her son's slovenly tendencies by explaining that he grew up with a maid. So perhaps it's not surprising that the founding of Facebook itself was also untidy, leaving in its wake a series of messy lawsuits-most notably by two alpha Harvard twins, who accused Mr. Zuckerberg of essentially stealing their idea.

That suit was ultimately settled years ago out of court. Yet, in recent months, unflattering details from those early days of Facebook have continued to surface. The Business Insider recently published an IM conversation that apparently took place between Mr. Zuckerberg and another Harvard student shortly after Facebook's founding, in which Mr. Zuckerberg offers to share his users' personal information and disparages them for turning it over so readily.

All of which has helped to touch off a sudden wave of Facebook worry. What exactly did we all sign up for? Who is safeguarding those pictures we uploaded of our weddings?

THIS PAST WEEK, Time magazine put Facebook on its cover. Subhead: "With nearly 500 million users, Facebook is connecting us in new (and scary) ways." In October, a feature film about Facebook, written by Aaron Sorkin, based on Ben Mezrich's critical 2009 book, The Accidental Billionaires, will arrive in theaters. U.S. senators are now scrambling to attach their signatures to letters of concern.

Not long ago, Mr. Kirkpatrick writes, Mr. Zuckerberg took a monthlong trip around the world, alone with a backpack, during which he "made a brief pilgrimage-by dusty local bus-to the ashram high in the Himalayas, where Steve Jobs and Baba Ram Dass, among others, have sought enlightenment." Back at the Facebook headquarters, according to Mr. Kirkpatrick, Mr. Zuckerberg would often walk around with a leather-bound diary, in which the young executive would scrawl out by hand his big thoughts on Facebook's global strategy. Mr. Zuckerberg named the diary the "Book of Change" and decorated it with a quote from Gandhi: "Be the change you want to see in the world."

And what is that change? "Facebook is founded on a radical social premise-that an inevitable enveloping of transparency will overtake modern life," writes Mr. Kirkpatrick. Inside the company, they call the concept "radical transparency."

"If we give people control over what they share, they will want to share more," wrote Mr. Zuckerberg on Monday, May 24, in The Washington Post. "If people share more, the world will become more open and connected. And a world that's more open and connected is a better world."

The Facebook Effect doesn't shy away from Mr. Zuckerberg's youthful indiscretions, but Mr. Kirkpatrick shows us that ultimately the rise of Facebook is not some simple story about a creepy engineer, but rather a complex tale about engineering creep-that is, the way in which tech geeks and executives are now aggressively applying algorithm-based solutions to areas of human life traditionally ministered by saints and humanists, tribe elders and scholars.

What does it mean for American society that so many adults are now willingly following codes of social behavior prescribed not by their parents but designed by their kids-college-age computer scientists dreaming not only of improving the world and getting rich but also of more efficiently finding coeds and organizing beer pong tournaments?

Friends and followers, beware.

fgillette@observer.com

A Charlie Brown Christmas on Hulu — Apparently there is a "War on Charlie Brown Christmas Specials!" Last week, President Obama's speech on Afghanistan bumped A Charlie Brown Christmas from CBS' scheduling, which some people thought was a kind of conspiracy. Anyway, this holiday classic featuring that charming, round-headed boy was recently added to Hulu, so parents need not worry about the kiddies missing out this year. It's only available  until Jan. 1, 2010 so get in your movie night before the New Year.

The Future of New York on Big Think — What will New York look like in 10, 25, or even 50 years? The city in constant reinvention is examined by experts for Big Think's "The Future of New York City" video series. Deputy Mayor Bob Lieber, novelist Paul Auster, an environmental activist, and more offer up some predictions, explaining how New York will become more "green" and warning that its reliance on Wall Street could turn us into Detroit.

The 10 Most Innovative Viral Video Ads of 2009 —Wondering how to make your little YouTube upload an online hit? You might want to check out some of these brilliant viral videos assembled at Mashable. Our favorites include this one for Volkswagen that encouraged people to take the stairs instead of the escalator, and another featuring a baby dancing to a Beyonce's "Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)," that pumps ad revenue and donations into his college fund. Brilliant.

BBC's Pedigree Dogs Exposed — This heartbreaking, controversial documentary caused a national upset in Britain when it was originally aired last summer. The hour-long film explores, as one expert put it, how we are breeding pedigreed dogs "to death." "Dogs are falling apart," one expert said. "The number of genetic problems are increasing at a frightening pace." BBC refused to air coverage of the annual Crufts dog competition (the U.K. equivalent of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show), according to the Guardian. Although Ofcom, the communications watchdog agency in the U.K., claimed that the documentary did not give the Kennel Club adequate opportunity to respond to the allegations in the film, the documentary forced the Kennel Club to change many of its policies to ensure better canine health (here's a list of some of the changes). The documentary is going to premiere in the States tonight on BBC America at 8 p.m., but you can watch it on MySpace now (not for the faint of heart).

Open Season on Native American sexual assault survivors — More than one in three Native American women will be raped in their lifetime, according to Amnesty International. Open Season is a shorter version of a full-length documentary that explores women survivors of systematic sexual assault; it includes interviews with experts, advocates and the women themselves. Some experts in the film argue that U.S. law enforcement has failed to protect these women or to prosecute their assailants. The film was created by Raquel Chapa, an N.Y.U. graduate and art and film curator who worked on an art show titled Native Voice, which opened in Brooklyn in the spring of 2008. She has also worked in Indigenous Collections at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, New Mexico and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Acknowledgment and support of her short film will be paid to organizations, communities and leaders that are working to end sexual violence against Native women.

As the Observer reported in November, the company will prepare digital versions of magazines that can work on multiple platforms, from the iPhone to the BlackBerry to digital devices that don't even exist yet.

Mr. Squires, an executive vice president at Time Inc., is planning to leave Time Inc. and become the managing director of the new company while the group will searches for a permanent executive.

What will this digital magazine store look like?

In an interview this morning, Mr. Squires said the format will be a "highly functioning, beautiful reading application similar to what you saw for Sports Illustrated or Wired." That means colorful, interactive digital magazines that can be updated in real time and personalized for individual users and advertisers. "We're going to enable that kind of product experience or reading experience across as many publications as possible," he told the Observer.

Mr. Squires said he is in talks even more media companies to join the venture, but didn't name names just yet.

Mr. Squires said he plans to work closely with advertisers to develop new immersive experiences on these digital magazines. "We have the potential to create a new and vastly important branding medium for advertisers in a way that has never been done before," he said. Signing on some ad sponsors for launch will be one of the company's major focuses during the next year.

As far as the iTunes-like digital storefront, Mr. Squires has a tagline to describe it: "easy access, easy purchase, easy download." He wants users to get universal access to their digital purchase on any device they like.

Mr. Squires wasn't able to give specifics on what kind of pricing or bundled packages the store will offer, "We've got a lot of work to do, we're really just getting going," he said.

Well, what if users want to be able to get, say, a subscription to digital magazine and the print magazine, as well as the publication's paywalled Web site, all in one purchase? It certainly won't be a universal pricing system, like Apple iTunes' original $.99 per song standard.

"It's hard to imagine how the Wall Street Journal will be the same price as This Old House," Mr. Squires told the Observer. "Clearly, that's going to be up to the publishers--setting their own pricing."

He said the company will work with start-ups and partnering companies' digital departments to build the technology.

"We're going to need as many resources as we can get," he said. "Building this middleware and this platform will be technically challenging. There's a lot of work to be done to get it right and big enough to work with companies at this scale, with very very large circulation products."

He said the company will also have to work closely with hardware companies to make sure they're building the right product for the platform. "We have to work in close coordination with the hardware companies," he said.

Are they working with Apple?

"We all call, we don't get a lot of return calls," Mr. Squires said.

Users will be able to swipe across the screen to flip pages as though it's a print product. They can also create their own version of the magazine, by arranging sections and stories in their preferred order. Along with the magazine articles, there's video, bonus photo shoot shots, live sports scores and stats from favorite teams and athletes (useful for the fantasy football types!). There's also game alerts, betting games, social networking capabilities and more.

Sports Illustrated worked with David Link, the founder of Wonderfactory, to help design the product. He told The New York Times that he was not sure whether the new digital magazine would be distributed through iTunes or other e-commerce stores. But he's certainly ready for an Apple tablet, if it ever comes out (a bunch of other publishers are too!). Certainly, the iTunes-like store that John Squires of Time Inc., Hearst and Conde Nast have in mind, and is expected to be revealed early next week, will be in the running. There's also news that Hearst is working on another mag platform called Skiff, which will allow them to sell digital versions of newspapers and magazines on e-readers and other mobile devices, according to today's Wall Street Journal.

But it remains to be seen whether ad revenue and charging for these tablet mags will be successful. Perhaps numbers from GQ's iPhone app sales, slapped with a $2.99 per issue price, will be an indictation. It was just released in stores on Nov. 25.

Taxi Driver on Hulu — Taxi Driver needs no introduction. Put one of Martin Scorsese's best in your Hulu queue for one of those dark, wintery nights.

21 Jump Street on Hulu — If you're looking for something a little lighter, there's three seasons of baby-faced Johnny Depp and a gaggle of young rookies playing undercover cops at high schools and sometimes colleges to fight crime. Look for bonus cameos from Brad Pitt, Christina Applegate, Vince Vaughn, Rosie Perez, Jason Priestley, Josh Brolin, Blair Underwood and more!

Path Lights — Path Lights, based on Tom Drury's 2005 New Yorker short story, is a plucky, thoughtful film that remixes the classic detective hero movie. John Hawkes (of Eastbound & Down and Me and You and Everyone We Know fame) plays Bobby, a guy who does voiceovers for an audio detective series. When a beer bottle falls from the sky, just missing his noggin, he decides to find out where it came from. David Lynch Foundation Television is hosting the 22-minute film for one week only, Dec. 2 through Dec. 9, before it makes the film festival rounds in 2010.

Can you throw a no-hitter on LSD? Dock Ellis did — As our sister from the same mister newsletter Very Short List points out, in 1970 "one major leaguer threw a no-hitter while high on acid and Benzedrine." Dock Ellis & the LSD No-No is the hilarious animated short that tells this truly incredible tale. Check it out.

Here Come The Waves: The Hazards Of Love Visualized — The Decemberists, that twee band that sometimes makes good, poppy rock music, just released a full-length "video album" called Here Come The Waves: The Hazards Of Love Visualized. It's available on iTunes and it's the first of this new breed of digital art for Apple's retailer. Four filmmakers—Peter Sluszka, Julia Pott, Guilherme Marcondes and Santa Maria—created original animated shorts with a section of the album as the soundtrack. Check out the official trailer.

Here's a peek inside some of the Times' most popular blogs, as offered by the editors:

Wendell Jamieson, deputy metropolitan editor for the Web who oversees City Room, the blog about New York for New Yorkers:

"Blog is a funny word to describe it, right?" Mr. Jamieson told the Observer. "It's really just a daily news report. We use the word 'blog' for lack of another term."

City Room debuted in June 2007 to provide breaking news, feature articles and reader conversations. Some of its reports include emergency landing of Flight 1549 in the Hudson River; M.T.A. fare hikes; popular baby names; bicycle racks; the history of Jewish delis; and the city's dog-scooping law.

Sewell Chan, City Room's bureau chief, wrote in his recent Talk to the Newsroom feature, that "[t]he tone of a blog post might often seem more conversational and less comprehensive than most traditional news articles, but we don't put anything on the blog that we would not be comfortable seeing in print. (Admittedly, we have experimented with first-person accounts, contests and even poetry.) We do avoid the opinion and mean-spirited snark associated with some blogs; snark isn't our thing."

But if City Room has one of the most unique voices among NYTimes.com blogs--it's one editors hope readers want to hear.

"City Room allows you to be very parochial in your coverage of New York City," Mr. Jamieson said. "We believe in covering New York for New Yorkers and going deep on things that only a New Yorker would really be fascinated by." Like, say, studies on architecture or neon signs with burned-out letters that "take on new (and unintended) meanings." "We do all sorts of stunt-type things," said Mr. Jamieson, like asking readers to get in on the rivalry between Montreal bagels and New York bagels.

Mr. Jamieson said City Room will be rolling out new columns and features in January, although he wouldn't go into detail. "We'll leverage metropolitan staff's deep knowledge of New York City institutions," is all he'd say.

As far as other fancy multi-media type stuff, Mr. Jamieson isn't concerned about keeping up with the latest blog gadgets. "Look, it's good stories--whether they're read the on the computer or a good newspaper. No matter how many slideshows you do, who cares? It has to be a good story, a strong one for City Room. That's what matters to us."

Vindu Goel, deputy technology editor of Bits, the tech news blog:

Bits launched in June 2007 among an increasingly crowded technology news market, but took a long-view reporting style in contrast to the quick-paced, casual tone at other tech sites.

"We don't cover all the breaking news in the blog the way that, say, TechCrunch does," Mr. Goel said. "We use [Bits] for some analysis that goes more in depth, with additional information about a story."

Bits has 12 contributors, including four editors. Mr. Goel said e-readers, the Google Books settlement and even the Netflix competition prize were popular subjects for the blog. Covering news like the Microsoft-Yahoo partnership deal, were also important milestones for Bits. Several posts about the subject worked better on the Web because by they fed news-hungry readers from the niche tech crowd.

Mr. Goel said Bits "is constantly working on" the voice of the blog. How can they make tech jargon accessible to the Times' broad readership without making tech nerds feel like they're reading a toaster's manual? Readers will usually tell them when they go wrong in the comments section, Mr. Goel said. "The interactivity is the best thing about the blog," he said. "We will get legions of comments, sometimes hundreds of comments, from all kinds of broad, general interest types of folks, asking how do I upgrade Windows Vista to people who will have a very heated about LED lighting."

Commentors have to register for NYTimes.com and Bits editors monitor posts to weed out the YouTube-like junk--no cursing or spam allowed. "We want to try to provide the readers with a better discussion," he explained. "People are expecting a little bit more from the comments."

Nick Bilton, a former user interface specialist for the Times, recently returned from working on a book to become Bits' new lead writer. He wrote in an introductory blog post that he hopes to open the discussion between readers and reporters even more. "The beauty of a blog is that it allows for conversation, not just oration, and I'll do my best to be part of the discussion," he wrote.

"I also hope to bring a new style of telling stories to the blog," he continued. "I don't believe storytelling is an art form of words alone. It's ocular, auditory, interactive and asynchronous. As I settle in and take off my training wheels, you can expect more graphics, audio slide shows, videos and data visualization on Bits."

Mr. Goel said, along with more multimedia features, he also hopes to include more "light and fun" posts between breaking news items.

"People take the Times so seriously sometimes," he told the Observer. "But I think it's okay for us have have a little fun too."

Tara Parker-Pope, lead writer for Well, a blog with the latest medical research and societal trends affecting personal health:

"It's difficult to compare blogs because we all have different goals," Ms. Parker-Pope told the Observer. The Lede might be gathering the most crucial daily news and helping Times readers understand it, while City Room is live-blogging breaking news. "For Well, we want to put readers' daily health conversation at the heart of the blog."

Ms. Parker-Pope "sifts through medical research and expert opinions for practical advice to help readers take control of their health and live well every day," according to the blog's description. But Well has also become a gathering place for readers to connect with Ms. Parker-Pope and the handful of running, nutrition, and other experts who occasionally contribute to the blog.

"On some days, my posts are based on my interests as an individual, as a single parent or a person who is trying to start exercising again," Ms. Parker-Pope said. "Those things are often reflected in the blog, but it's really to reflect what other people," she said.

"Well has a specific journalistic mission which is to really tell readers about their own lives," she continued. "Readers really like to learn about themselves and talk about themselves--we all do."

They also like to comment--a lot--and send Ms. Parker-Pope tips for stories. One of her favorite articles came from a readers' question, asking whether doctors and nurses should wear scrubs on the subway. Some commenters have become contributors. Kairol Rosenthal, a regular commentor on the blog, eventually wrote about cancer for Well.

Ms. Parker-Pope left The Wall Street Journal in 2007 to write about consumer health for The Times and she said she has never been closer to her readers.

She even trained for a marathon with them, and shared her experience, with a Web-based application called Run Well. 

Ms. Parker-Pope expects to expand on more running and recipe coverage. As far as multimedia features, she'd like to do more--if only there was more time.

"The limits to the blog are always about time as a resource," she said. "My goal is to continue serving this audience, engage them and interest them and surprise every now and then."

Here's an outline of the info, gathered by Pingdom, a digital service that alerts businesses when their Web site is out of order.

- The social news sites Digg, Reddit and Slashdot have significantly more male users than female. The standout here is Slashdot. 82% of their users are male.
- Twitter and Facebook have almost the same male-female ratio; Twitter with 59% female users and Facebook with 57%.
- The most female-dominated site? Bebo (66% female users), closely followed by MySpace and Classmates.com (64%).
- The average ratio of all 19 sites was 47% male, 53% female.

So why are so many women connecting on social networks, but not as involved in social news sites like Digg and Reddit?

The Wall Street Journal reported on a study with similar results in early October, and spoke with Aaron Smith, a research specialist at the Pew Internet and American Life Project. "Men are more likely to use transactional types of tools, like online banking," he told WSJ. "Not to say that men don't like to talk, and that women don't need to get information, but in general when we look at the overall picture, we see women gravitating toward those applications that allow them to connect with friends and share information with people they know."

But perhaps the question is whether there truly are more women conversing on sites like Twitter, or if they are just spambots registering as females. Don Synstelien, a strategist for social networks who worked in research and development at MySpace, wrote on Pingdom's comment page that "possibly 25% of every 'female' profile that I viewed was a spam page."