Boyd Jones: Kurt, you walk a tightrope between deciding what is a hot topic that will draw interest and participation, and what is inflammatory and sure to bring out predictable responses from some of the same people. Do you envision any changes in the TOTD format that will encourage civility and that might invite participation from a wider audience?

Thanks for a job well done.

Kurt Greenbaum: Thanks for the kind words, Boyd. The blogs in general are one of my favorite parts of our site, because it really gives our reporters and editors a chance to interact with readers -- and for readers to interact with each other.

Writing the Talk fo the Day is among the highlights of the day for me, because it gives me a chance to reflect on the news of the day and, frankly, guess about what people will be talking about the next morning.

I haven't given much thought to how we could change the format, but I'm open to suggestions. Whenever you get two or three people with different opinions together, you're bound to have conflict. I try and watch the comments as closely as I can and when I catch personal attacks, I'll get rid of them.

Getting new people? I wish I had a good answer for that. Candidly, that's why we only require light registration in the blogs in order to post -- we want to let people easily participate on the spur of the moment. But, again, if you have ideas about how to draw a wider audience, I'm all ears.

Richard F. Smith: A petty complaint: The headngs on your news section suggest geographic structure; yet, a link under St. Charles may refer to one of the other areas, which is annoying and suggests incompetent organization of information. Suggestion: Re-structure the pages under different headings and organization, or simply link stories from a general news page that reflects all local news.

Kurt Greenbaum: Thanks for your question, Richard. I think if I follow your comment, you're talking about some of the geographic references that may appear in headlines. And, if you're visiting the St. Charles page of STLtoday.com, I can understand why that would be troublesome.

I'll be perfectly honest and tell you that SOME of that is the result of how newspaper stories are fed to the web site. It's far from a perfect system right now, and perhaps too automated for our own good.

Some of it is also because our editors may think a story from one "zone" of our readership area may be of interest to St. Charles readers -- whether or not it actually happened in St. Charles.

To the first issue, I'm aware we need to do some work on that. Please stay tuned as we work on the best solution to that problem.

Amber: Who does your multimedia and why does the design vary from application to application? This latest Pujols graphic is an example. Does Jacob Piercy really know how to upload photos -- two are missing?

Kurt Greenbaum: We have a number of people in our newsroom who produce multimedia, including folks in Jacob's department (graphics), the online news department and photo. We also collaborate with reporters and editors to produce multimedia content. You can see our latest multimedia if you visit http://www.stltoday.com/multimedia.

As for whether Jacob knows how to upload pictures, I'll let you ask him (jpiercy@post-dispatch.com) that question yourself. :-) I can remind him that there's some photos missing from the graphic you're referring to (you can find it on our Cardinals page at http://www.stltoday.com/cards).

One of my colleagues, Denise Kosarek, sent me this direct link to the graphic you're talking about: http://graphics.stltoday.com/interactive/pujolshr2007/

Kurt Greenbaum: In the absence of more questions right now, I'll just mention that we're excited about some of the changes we've made to the site in recent months. The addition of new video to the site in the past three or four months is really just a beginning. We expect to build on that quickly over the next few months.

I'm also excited about our new live discussion software, because I've seen other sites really do great to create regular programming features with the audience.

Look for improvements in the business section of the site as well, coming soon.

Philip Barron: Two questions, Kurt:

The website has undergone a couple of revisions that have gotten rid of some of the "heaviness" of the layout, but it still seems awfully crowded. Any thoughts given to a design with more white space ala the Washington Post or the New York Times?

Also: Interactivity with readers seems the way forward with newspapers sites - in-house blogs with comments and the fourms and the like, and the Technorati tracking the P-D employs with AP stories. Do you expect to widen Technorati use to include stories original to the P-D? Also, what are the chances of STLtoday involving itself with local community blogs as is done at the Oklahoman website?

Kurt Greenbaum: Great questions, Philip. Thanks for taking the time to visit. Let me address the first now and the second in another posting....

I appreciate your comment that we've done some work to lighten up the page, but there's no question that we'll need to continue looking at ways to do more of it. Referencing my earlier comment, just the fact that we're adding new content to the site means we have work to do the on design.

For example, we've substantially added to the multimedia on the site, but we're not displaying it to maximum advantage.

So, the short answer: Yes, there IS thought to what the next steps in our design should be -- I just don't have a timeline for you on that.