First, Arizona Senator John McCain launched his new campaign website: Stormtroopers for McCain '08. Okay, so it's not actually targeted to Imperial Stormtroopers, but you have to admit the color scheme is highly... evocative...

Next, we've got the McCain MySpace page, which got a whole heap of sapphic supportiveness. MySpace is no longer just the domain of America's youth, it's also a favorite hangout of our elected members of Congress. We know what happens when Congressmembers find out about Instant Messenger, but what happens when Senators decide to set up their own pages? Hilarity! It seems that the Senator's staff pirated a MySpace template from Mike Davidson, and didn't give Mike credit for the site design. Oops! And not only that, but they were stealing Mike's bandwidth by including sample images hosted by Mike on their page. This allowed Davidson to create, in his own words, an "immaculate hack" -- he was able to hack McCain's page without touching anything of McCain's. And this is what he did:

Awesome makeover, Mike!

But wait, there's more! Josh Marshall (he of the Talking Points Memo) is redesigning his popular liberal blog, and wants feedback on design ideas. I like this a great deal. Marshall isn't just slapping a new look on the old site, he's researching emerging trends in information presentation to find the best practices for the web. I'm looking forward to test-driving the new look and layout.

And as if that weren't enough, Daily Kos is not just redesigning its site, it's switching formats altogether! As I was reading the post announcing the change, I was struck by a few things:

Lots of folks may freak out over the changes, but I think the community at large will enjoy this new version of DailyKos with its many comments, avatars, and sig lines with pictures. I know I will.

When I read this, I immediately thought of forums, as these are all features of forums. But forums aren't really like blogs, which confused me. (For a comparison of forums and blogs, check out the official forum for the TV show Survivor, and compare that with a blog like Boing Boing. The setup, layout, and overall feel of the sites are very, very different.) But, I decided that I must be imagining things. Until I read:

Forums on the new DailyKos will include: Elections, Politics, Open Forum, Humor and Jokes, and any others that occur to us.

Oh. But notice the rhetoric here -- CT isn't exactly saying that Daily Kos will become a forums-only site, just that the new site will have forums. Whew. That's a relief. Except that...

One feature that will excite many of you is that there will no longer be front page stories, diaries, or mojo, thus simplifying the DailyKos experience for everyone. It might take some getting used to, but we'll all be happier for it afterward.

A blog without front page stories isn't a blog at all. It's a forum. And they're ditching the diaries, too. This does not "excite" me. It saddens me. I found the diaries to be one of the biggest and coolest community-building ideas in the blogosphere. They're going to be using phpBB, an open source forum platform, which is nice, ideologically. But I'm still filled with foreboding.

I have an ongoing discussion with The Spouse about my refusal to read newspapers online. Okay, it's not really a discussion, it's more of an argument. And it's not really about my refusal to read newspapers online, it's really more about my refusal (so far) to write about my refusal to read newspapers online and then send that off to academic journals. But still.

Anyway, in a nutshell, I have much the same problem that Josh Marshall discusses in his post: online newspapers do not have the same "topical serendipity" as print papers. That is, I scan, glance around, and flip through the pages of a print newspaper. I don't do this with online papers. And I don't do this with forums. When I'm on a World of Warcraft forum, for instance, I'm there to find answers to particular questions, not to enjoy a sense of community. I read World of Warcraft blogs for that. And I really do feel more connection to WoW Insider than I do to the official WoW Druid Forum. (Druids ftw!)

So, there you have it. A whole lot of sites are getting a whole lot of spring cleaning. When did you last redesign your site?

(X-posted on Lives Online)