Gawker's Back!

Gawker Media sites returned to their regularly scheduled format last night after the websites posted on a new, spare looking tumblrs while the servers struggled to get up and running after they were flooded.

"Hey, Old Pre-Superstorm Sandy Gawker is Back, You Guys," Gawker EIC A.J. Daulerio posted last night. The tumblr had its fans, however. Mostly fans of the way things used to be, pre-Gawker redesign, post-invention of the Internet-weblog. And those fans will be inevitably disappointed that the site is back to normal. 

Oh well, it will take some time until all the tumblr posts are moved over onto Gawker sites. And, like all hurricane-related recovery, don't expect it to be a smooth process.

"So we're back. Kind of," wrote Mr. Daulerio. "There will be some other kinks obviously (ALWAYS) but let's just all pretend that tomorrow and the rest of the week will be somewhat back to normal for this site."

But stop complaining, commenters. Count your blessings. There are lots of people actually impacted by this storm. You know what, how about helping the recovery effort instead of reading blogs?

"We're still in better shape than most people and everyone who reads this site should devote some time this week to helping the Rockaways and Staten Island recover," Mr. Daulerio wrote. "Seriously. Do something."

Actually, there is no reason you can't waste time on the Internet and volunteer. There sure are a lot of hours in the day now that we are back in our offices.

Official terms of the bet with Denton: We will check Quantcast on October 1, 2011. The goal is 510M pageviews/month. It’s $10 for every million over/under. [So $600 to me if it’s 450M.] If the design reverts to the old format, he forfeits and pays out $1000. (Lockhart is the arbiter of what constitutes “design change.”) New or acquired sites do not count in the numbers. And finally, Nick’s stipulation: the money handover is to be done in public and photographed. So bring pies.

It's an interesting bet, since the redesign of Gawker seems to focus more on creating space for big scoops, visual content and premium ads, meaning more user engagement and possibly fewer pageviews. 

Former Gawker editor Gabriel Synder pointed out that pageviews seem to have fallen in the immediate aftermath of the redesign, but Denton's not worried. "I'm going to clean him out," he crowed. 

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

"Late last year, Gawker acknowledged StumbleUpon as its second largest source of social site referrals, behind only Facebook. Without our badges on their sites, we expect less Gawker content to be rated, reviewed and shared through StumbleUpon which would be unfortunate for Gawker and for the many StumbleUpon users who are initially introduced to content like Gawker's through our service. Since we launched badges in April 2010, we've seen a twelve-fold increase in badge views to more than 100M per day from more than 100,000 sites, as publishers have discovered the importance of StumbleUpon as a key source of qualified traffic."

This chart, which Peter Kafka says comes from Gawker's Christopher Mascari, shows StumbleUpon in a clear second place, sending far more traffic than Digg, Reddit, or Twitter.  

In an email StumbleUpon noted that less than a month ago it passed Facebook to became the number one source of social media traffic, according to StatCounter.

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

When Governor Chris Christie killed the ARC Tunnel, the nation's largest single infrastructure project ever undertaken, he doomed thousands of Garden State residents to longer commutes for the forseeable future. But because the nixing of the project also means the abandonment of a new New Jersey Transit station, the MTA has decided to accelerate plans to spruce up Penn Station for its Long Island Railroad riders, according to The Journal.

This will not be the grand new station many riders would hope for, as is currently planned for Amtrak at the neighboring Farley Post Office, future home of Moyn* Station. Instead, the MTA is looking at interim fixes,  such as improved signage and wayfinding and perhaps some improvements to the dingy warren of passageways created by Robert Moses a half-century ago.

"It's a facility that's showing its age," LIRR President Helena Williams said. "It's cluttered visually, functionally."

The railroad plans to issue a solicitation early next year for designers to study the problems at Penn Station and come up with proposals for fixing them. Ms. Williams said she expects that process to take less than a year. Then it'll be up to the LIRR to figure out how to implement them, she said.

The plan could take a while, in part because it requires the three rail operators to sign off on any new plans.

This is only the latest change to a hodge-podge of concourses and causeways--New Jersery Transit had the most recent renovation, in 2004, and Amtrak and the LIRR have been largely untouched since the '90s. Yet these differing designs and riot of signs and fonts and colors are part of the problem, and fixing up only one set does not seem like the best solution. What Penn Station really needs is a unified design, as is made clear in an excellent series on signage that Slate produced last year, including the below video.

Yet one imagines getting all three ral operator to agree on what actually to do would be harder than getting Moynihan Station built.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo