Electro-ramblings

IT website ZDNet has undergone a complete redesign, launching this morning with a radical makeover of its pages.

After launching a huge suite of blogs during the last two years - which led to huge increases in traffic - ZDNet has now gone the whole hog with Web 2.0.

The site include loads of social networking features and nice features like a tag cloud showing the most popular keywords being written about and accessed.

News on the home page has tabbed browsing, so you can look at the latest stories, but also filter by most discussed, most popular and those highlighted by the editors.

An interview with Matt Loney, the site director, on Liberate Media shows just how far the firm has moved away from the traditional publishing paradigms.

"We've put a lot of thought into search with our redesign, because in addition to encouraging user generated content, we want to give readers a way to discover each other based on the content they and their peers are creating as much as on who knows whom."

This is probably the first example of a publisher, originally from the print world, totally embracing Web 2.0. Let's hope it's not the last.