boston.com

Peter Kadzis at WGBH and Carly Carioli at Boston.com.

Poynter interviews new Globe editor Brian McGrory, who says the current boston.com/bostonglobe.com dichotomy is too confusing and that he plans to make people pay for all in-depth reporting on bostonglobe.com, while making the free boston.com "more social media, more community bloggers, hopefully edgier content."

John Carroll reports.

The Globe announced today it's hired former WFNX staffers Henry Santoro, Julie Kramer and Adam 12 and former program director Paul Driscoll to build an alt-music streaming service that will be available both through the Web and mobile apps.

A launch date and program details will be announced later this summer.

Some lucky visitors to the Globe's breaking-news blog have been enjoying a what-if ad for at least the past couple of days. Hey, at least we still have T.C., right?

Eagle-eyed Ron Newman, who actually scrolls all the way down the boston.com homepage, noticed this link today, perhaps written by somebody with even less of a grasp on actual Boston geography than I have.

Boston.com announces it's gotten rid of all its pop-under ads.

Dan Kennedy reports the Globe has given up trying to moderate story comments on boston.com and is outsourcing the whole thing to some company in Winnipeg. No profanity allowed and stop making accusations about Carl Crawford; one wonders whether wise-guy Boston trolls will try to sneak any Boston-English variants past the Manitobans.

UPDATE: Heard back from a boston.com editor, who says the photo "slipped through the cracks" and that they'll take care of it.

At least, that's what I'm assuming after seeing one of my photos show up on the front page of the Globe's Back Bay Your Town site without anybody from the Globe asking for permission. I realize there's fair use and I always appreciate links from giant media organizations (and I certainly do my share of linking to Globe stuff), but really, running an entire photo at near original size without asking first? Seems a bit much. Especially since somebody might now think the photo is copyright 2010 New York Times Co., when it's not.

See the duck photo below? Yeah, there's a reason it looks familar:

Did they advertise the new Dorchester site with a photo of the Blue Line?

H/t to the tipster who sent this in.

Announces two tiers of online access: Stuff produced by Globe reporters at bostonglobe.com, which you'll have to pay to see, and something at the current boston.com that sounds like G online with a bit of breaking daily news that happened too late to get into the paper. Plus more exciting pop-up ads:

BostonGlobe.com, with the goal of creating a "lean-back experience" for readers, will have a simpler, newspaper-like design with less intrusive ads, he said.

Dan Kennedy relays the news that boston.com's Dave Beard is leaving to help the National Journal crush Politico.

Although they're still called "Your Town:"

• Allston-Brighton
• Back Bay
• Dorchester
• Jamaica Plain
• South Boston
• South End

The Globe reports on itself, quotes a statement from a Globe spokesman that boston.com has turned off a business directory until it can discover how the escort ads highlighted by local blogger Dave Copeland (note to boston.com readers: here's the link you won't find there) got into its system.

Copeland himself praises the Globe for acting quickly, but adds the real point is that pressure on Craigslist to shut down its ads isn't going to stop losers like Markoff:

Let's face it - the Craigslist Killer has a nice ring to it, but he easily could have been the Google Adsense Killer, The Boston Phoenix Killer or the Erotic Review Killer. And, most likely he would have done what he did, one way or another: the guy was sick and needed money and these things happen with or without free speech.

Why, boston.com and its handy search engine.

UPDATE: Blogger gets results as boston.com turns off the escort ads.

The Globe will launch a South Boston Your Town site on Sept. 9, Mike Wallace at boston.com tweets. This will be boston.com's first neighborhood site in Boston.

The AOL hypermicrominisuperlocal effort is opening up sites for Jamaica Plain and the South End.

Somehow, that all makes sense. The Globe talks to some of the people who post replies to its articles, although not the hard-core trollers who blame Obama for car crashes on Gallivan Boulevard. For some reason, they didn't want to be quoted for the record.

The cesspoolization of online commenting has gotten so bad, the Globe reports, "even the Chinese government has had enough."

AOL's Patch hyperlocal network is advertising jobs for editors of new sites in Back Bay, Beacon Hill, Charlestown and the South End, as well as all of Boston, according to postings on the AOL corporate site.

The incursion is a full scale attack on, well, almost nobody, since boston.com has yet to set up a single Your Town hyperlocal site in the city it's named for. The South End News does have a longstanding site, unlike the Back Bay Courant, which doesn't get this InterWebs thing.

In addition to these jobs, Patch is also advertising for editors in the sort of suburban towns now the domain of GateHouse Media's Wicked Local sites. And it's advertising for a Boston-specific ad director.

Lost Remote takes a look at Patch's massive expansion in metro areas across the country.

NOTE: AOL uses some furshlugginer token system to keep you from bookmarking specific job postings. If you want to see where Patch is hiring locally, go to the AOL careers page, click on Search Openings, then select Patch as the brand and United States - Massachusetts - Boston as the location.

Kimberley Isbell at Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab examines the legal issues behind the hullabaloo over the iPad RSS aggregator the Times hates because it came with Times and boston.com RSS feeds built in.

Christopher Mayer told Emily Rooney on "Greater Boston" tonight he and other Globe execs are still studying how to make consumers pay for their news online - like they do for the paper edition.

Mayer pointed to some considerations:

• The Web is no longer the only online medium - tablets and other mobile devices can now be used to distribute content.
• Boston is a more competitive news market than Worcester, where telegram.com will soon begin charging for access.
• boston.com advertising revenue is "actually very healthy" and the Globe needs to be careful in possibly disrupting that with a paywall that could cut down on page views.

Mike Mennonno reports on being asked and then un-asked to be a voice from the community:

... Frankly, I feel a little bit like the girl who got invited to the prom as a cruel joke in one of those early '80s "After-School Specials." Or Carrie.

Globe: Workers evacuated after white powder found in S. Boston building
Channel 5: Mystery Green Powder Prompts Evacuations

Interestingly, they both rely on the same source at the Boston Fire Department. Wonder what color Channel 25 thinks it was?

Oh, come on, boston.com, you're not even trying any more. Having played out the idea of "photos of people who look like other people" and "photos of dogs who look like their owners," the site is now reduced to running photos of random Boston-area pets - taken by Boston Magazine, no less.

If you decide to comment on an article appearing in the Boston Globe's web site, you'd better be careful of the words you use, even if in the context of your statement the word is perfectly harmless. I tried to enter a comment following their classical-music critic Jeremy Eichler's story on the schedule of operas next season by Opera Boston. I expressed the hope that they would not add any distracting features such as the video the Boston Lyric Opera inserted into their their staging of Benjamin Britten's setting of the Henry James novella "Turn of the Screw". (One opera being staged is Beethoven's "Fidelio" a piece with a story line that could be interpreted as being political in nature.