Tens of days ago, The New York Times decided to expand its coverage of personal technology. Gadgetwise is one of the first products of that decision. A new personal-tech blog, Gadgetwise is currently organized around four product categories (digital photography, home entertainment, mobile technology and personal computing), each with a dedicated contributor.

Gadgetwise's mission is to help make people smarter about, well, gadgets–both the gadgets they're thinking about buying and the gadgets they already have. Every day, the blog will feature product news, analysis of tech-industry issues that affect consumers, and a growing database of tips, tricks and hacks that help people get the most out of their hardware and software.

We'll be adding more features to Gadgetwise in the coming weeks, but we wanted to get the conversation started sooner rather than later. Poke around, take a read and let us know what you think.

And thanks for coming to check us out.

Rings is dedicated to the full range of topics surrounding the summer Games in Beijing, from the competition itself to the social, political and economic issues attached to them. Rings brings together analysis and perspectives from sports, foreign and business reporters at The New York Times and in its bureaus around the world.

"We expect the Rings blog, which draws on The Times's talent and resources across all departments, to become a must read for those interested in all aspects of the Beijing Games," said Sandy Keenan, deputy sports editor, The New York Times. "The blog will serve as an engaging platform for continuous sports and news coverage during the Games."

The Games in Beijing are already generating worldwide attention, and Times journalists have begun to post about issues such as the controversy surrounding the torch relay, the intricacies of the Olympic trials in the United States and discussions of Web censorship by China's government.

"Of course, everything on the Web is free, so it's understandable why they would want to do that," said Alan Mutter a former editor at the San Francisco Chronicle and proprietor of a blog about the Internet and the news business called Reflections of a Newsosaur.

"The more page views you have, the more you can sell," he said. "In the immediate moment it's a perfectly good idea."

The longer-term problem for publishers like the Times is that they must find ways to present content online rather than just transferring stories and pictures from the newspaper.

Most U.S. news Web sites offer their contents for free, supporting themselves by selling advertising. One exception is The Wall Street Journal which runs a subscription-based Web site.

TimesSelect generated about $10 million in revenue a year. Schiller declined to project how much higher the online growth rate would be without charging visitors.

The New York Times, the gray lady of establishment journalism, plans to begin posting user-generated video in March, an executive said Wednesday.

Speaking in a panel discussion at the SIIA Information Industry Summit in New York City, Times executive Nicholas Ascheim said that developing video content is costly.

"The most expensive thing is the journalists themselves. That's why user-generated content is interesting," said Mr. Ascheim, director of entertainment for video and audio at New York Times Digital.

Today, the New York Times launched its site redesign, announced by a prominent editor's note on the homepage. There's a few lessons for bloggers to learn from the redesign, as well as some evidence that the Times itself has been learning from bloggers.

The most prominent change is the new wide page layout, which makes great use of the expanded screen real estate that serious web geeks have available on their displays. A lot has been written about these wider pages recently, but many of the first sites to make smart use of this kind of design have been Movable Type-powered blogs like Gawker Media's Sploid, Paul Scrivens' Whitespace, Kevin Cornell's Bearskinrug, Jason Santa Maria's blog and Khoi Vin's Subtraction. The additional space on the page lets the Times use large and valuable ad units online without compromising the amount of editorial information displayed.