Dan Frommer from SAI sat down with NY Times chief technology officer Marc Frons to find out what’s going on at the newspaper’s digital division. Last week we interviewed NY Times Blogrunner Product Manager Philippe Lourier about where their blog aggregation tool is headed. Frommer gets a good look and more information on the NY Times overall digital strategy.

The interview focuses on content syndication, widgets, aggregation (w/Blogrunner), social overlay (w/TimesPeople) and Personalization. They are also planning iPhone apps and APIs so that developers can pull data out of their content repository. I am very excited to see that they are thinking about widgets. Why not get the NY Times content out all over the Web and potentially monetize the widgets or do a revshare with the partner sites. Frommer grabbed a screenshot of what the most popular widget might look like when it launches this summer.

I’d like to see more content discovery — the site is certainly overwhelming in content. What works in print doesn’t always translate to the Web. Perhaps they can learn from the Web 2.0 services that are creating strong discovery engines based on your profile and preferences.

As I pointed out to Philippe, the NY Times is sitting on a gold mine and they haven’t opened the doors yet to share and sell the gold. The online news landscape could change once those doors open up.

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Source:CenterNetworks

You know Expedia, right? They began life as a Microsoft company. Yesterday they were fired from MSN. Get out, pack your bags and get out! Beginning yesterday, MSN Travel is now hitched with Orbitz. This change affects customers in the U.S. and in the U.K.

Kyle Peterson from Forbes notes that a Microsoft spokesman said the company decided to switch to Orbitz because it preferred the travel site’s features and customer service.

The monthly traffic that will now be diverted in the air to Orbitz is in the range of 3.5 million unique visitors per month. When I check Expedia’s status board, all lines say "Delayed". This is a big hit for Expedia.

In my opinion Expedia’s usability is much better than Orbitz. Was this deal completed for the reasons listed above or really for financial reasons?

Last month we took a look at Expedia’s traffic using Google Trends. Here’s a chart of Expedia vs. Orbitz. Currently Expedia shows 2x more traffic than Orbitz. This MSN Travel deal could easily bring both companies together in terms of site traffic.

There have been notable fizzles as well: HireRight (HIRE) and Orbitz (OWW) are below their […]