Dutch news website www.en.nl has incorporated innovative design features under the direction of Wilbert Baan, interaction designer for the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant.

The first change is an interactive "newsriver" (see photo, click to enlarge). The numbers along the bottom, running from 0 to 23, represent the hours of the day, with each bar in the chart corresponding to the amount of new stories released that hour.

Toggle the mouse across the bars in the chart; each time the mouse reaches a new hour, the headlines from that time block appear in a list on the right hand side of the screen.

The bottom of the page also features recent images, social bookmarking tools, and lists of the most commented, most important, and most viewed, reports the Online Journalism Blog (OJB).

"We are using around ten variables to decide what's important news," Baan said. "The variables we're using right now are pageviews, visits from external websites, unique referrers to an article, comments, votes (4 options) and the press agency urgency variable (3 options; normal, high, very high)."

Baan concedes that the "most important" algorithm is still in development but says that "it already works remarkably well."  

A second groundbreaking change is the list of incoming links to the articles. The idea of pinging back is common amongst bloggers, but is not often embraced by mainstream news sites.  

"With one simple move the site demonstrates it's part of the conversation," writes OJB.

Source: Online Journalism Blog through IFRA Executive News Service