Globe's Newton site is live

I've spent some time with this Newton thing (dear Boston.com: Please come up with a name for these sites, mkay?). There's some way cool stuff, and I give the Globe props for some serious attention to letting visitors participate, but as a community platform, it needs a fair amount of work.

First, the good stuff: The site successfully aggregates all the Newton stuff the Globe already has: News, classifieds, real-estate listings, calendar, sports, etc. There's even a Newton-specific search engine. All by itself, that's a great start for city-specific site, and it's probably something boston.com should have done a long time ago.

But, at least initially, that's sort of where it ends (and here is where I begin criticism of a site that just went live today). Sure, there's the aggregation of other local news and voices, but they may have done too good a job of blending it into their design. There's no "voice" to the thing, no sense that there's somebody who's really enthusiastic about the Garden City and wants you to know about all this cool stuff he's found and hear what think about it. It all feels kind of auto-generated - a homegrown Outside.in just with more photos.

There's also a sort of disconnectedness to the different pieces. Part of it's simple design - Newton forums and real-estate listings should look like part of this new Newton site, not part of the "old" boston.com.

But there's a more fundamental issue of disjointedness when it comes to community participation - something you really want to avoid, because that participation is what's going to get people to come back every single day, not calendar listings. The site offers three ways for readers to participate, and none are really connected to the other two: Comment on a news story and people who frequent the forums will never see your post (and vice versa). And visitors to either of those commenting areas won't see any interesting stuff in the wiki, unless, of course, they scan the entire front page, which they might not.

Some minor nits: There's no RSS feeds for anything outside the wiki and the forums (the real-estate listings have an RSS feed - but it's for Globe arts stories!). "Newton" at the tops of pages should be linked back to the home page, because pretty much everybody expects that (even with that "home" button in the toolbar). The Wiki Add/Edit tabs are at the very bottom but should be right at the top, as another way to encourage participation by people who may not grok wikis. The link to mbta.com at the very top of the page is a waste of valuable real estate.

Dan Kennedy analyzes the site, concludes boston.com has leapfrogged over Wicked Local Newton as a Newton portal (although Greg Reibman of the latter might disagree), but hopes both news outlets find a way to stay around.