NYTimes.com announced the beta launch of Times Extra, an alternative view of the home page featuring news headlines with links from third-party sources. Times Extra aggregates headlines from other news organizations and blogs across the web, and matches the most relevant of those sources with lead articles on the NYTimes.com home page.
In the Times Extra view, relevant headlines from around the Web appear beneath many of the articles in the upper half of the homepage. Source names are highlighted in green. Users can scroll within these boxes to view up to eight Extra headlines.
To view Times Extra, users click on the new “Times Extra†button at the top of the home page, above the search bar. After 24 hours, readers will need to click the button to reactivate Times Extra for another 24 hours. The “Switch Back†button at the top of the Times Extra view returns users to the standard home page.
The automated ranking of news stories is powered by Blogrunner, a news aggregator owned by The Times Company that continually crawls the web and links to stories from more than 10,000 sources; the ranking on Blogrunner is determined by its popularity on the web.
Originally posted on December 4, 2008 @ 11:09 am