The Gray Lady will soon get a splash of color: this Friday, videos from PurpleStates.TV should go live on The New York Times‘s website.

The holiday season is supposed to be a happy time of year, and it would be a shame to discuss the death of print during it. So we’ll talk about print’s life, instead; new numbers from Compete indicate that it could be a long one yet.

No one received more top ranking story placements on Google News than the New York Times, which dropped its subscription-based Times Select model earlier this year.

Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, gave a long and passionate speech in London last week at a memorial event hosted by The Guardian — the full text of which is here — and in it he said many valuable and wise things about the practice of journalism (although he kind of glossed over stuff like Jayson Blair and Judith Miller, but whatever).

One has to wonder what kind of traffic and ad revenue the New York Times gave up while its Times Select subscription model was in place.

If you want to see evidence of why blogs continue to grow as a source for news, while mainstream media (MSM) sites appear stagnant, you need look no further than the latest announcement by the New York Times.

One look at the New York Times’ expansion of Blogrunner and you know it’s going to be a hit. It’s been around a little while, but today the NYT expanded the technology section to include other news sites and bloggers.

There is an inherent competitiveness within the media industry, and any given entity goes about its business as though parallel organizations don’t exist – and throwing the competition a hyperlink is tantamount to endorsement. After all, if you sell shoes, you wouldn’t willingly direct customers to another shoe store, would you?

Two years after dropping its columnists behind a subscription wall, the New York Times tore down the barrier to a valuable source of traffic: search engines.

Yahoo has something in the works called Yahoo Mash, but they suffered from a case of premature invitation when they told a New York Times blogger about the service.

A piece by a New York Times writer drew material from an interview with a blogger who broke the story, but failed to credit him or his blog thanks to an editor’s removal of the reference.

The ‘My Times’ personalized start page has opened to the website’s readership as developers work on rooting out the remaining bugs in the service.

We can all agree, I think, that for things we like, full is better than partial. This goes for nudity, chocolate donuts, and cleanliness. But we’re really talking about readership here, and text feeds, and the ongoing riff between reader and publisher regarding subscriber entitlement.

Publishers, who tend to favor partial RSS feeds and work them like broadcast news teasers, want readers to click through and visit the website. If increasing page views is the goal, then this makes intuitive sense.

The monthly charge for access to New York Times columnists may be ending soon, with flagging subscriptions for the TimesSelect service cited as a reason.

The New York Times and NBC News/msnbc.com said today they would work together on coverage of the 2008 presidential election.

Ok, so the New York Times doesn’t exactly get Google’s top algorithm execs to tell us how the search engine calculates search results, but they do get fresh insight as to how Google decides to update it’s technology.

The article includes interviews with Amit Singhal, Matt Cutts and Udi Manber.

Insights include details of Google’s internal system for evaluating search queries, called Debug.

If you were, by some chance, to search for “sex” on Google, what sort of sites would you expect to see?  Perhaps we shouldn’t give explicit examples, but a lot of users were surprised when internal archive search results from the New York Times ranked just behind Wikipedia and Salon.

And we have yet another example of the distance contextual advertising has to go. When a New York Times advertisement pops up above a guide to the Big Apple’s cocaine scene, there is clearly more work to be done – unless the NYT would actually endorse such a thing.

The ad is covered in a thick layer of irony, informing its target market that the Times is the "ultimate guide to global travel," advising on:

If we’re to believe the tripe fed to us by CNET recently, we’d have to add the New York Times to the list of “spammers” and “scammers” out to game Digg. Why?

It seems odd at first glance that just because the New York Times caught up with the news-sharing concept by adding tools to submit to Digg, Facebook, and Newsvine got a whole article written about it in the Seattle Post Intelligencer. It’s about time, you might think, but the real story is the serious lift and credibility it gives those Web 2.0 sites.

Living in Silicon Valley has been an intoxicating and suffocating experience all wrapped up into a lavish party with gourmet food and cocktails poured through a block of chiseled ice. Everyday I live, breath, sleep everything two dot oh, and what started as a way of making the web more dynamic and interactive, is now one big pool of punch where programmers, marketers, and startup founders are the new rock stars and everyone wants to jump in to take a dip and take a sip.