It's weird at first.

But the new design at the NYTimes.com site kind of grows on you. Slightly more ad space and better image placement. Overall I like it. Dan Kennedy does too. And at least they didn't dumb it down with a MyTimes type of thing. (At least not yet.)

There's an interesting "Most Blogged" section. I'm not sure what drives the results, but we'll see, over time, how helpful it is. It's a step in the right direction, anyway.

Could a Globe online redesign be far behind? I hope not. The Globe site really works; you can get a sense of the whole paper on the one main page and then explore from there. But progress for progress sake is an unstoppable force in media companies, so expect changes.

A Herald redesign, on the other hand, would be welcome. There are parts of the paper that never see the light of a computer screen, not because they're not published online, but because finding them requires so many layers of navigation that most people (by that I mean me) often don't bother. It's easier to just buy the paper. Hmmm.