The FT, the Western world's last remaining respected financial paper not owned by Rupert Murdoch, has unveiled an early version of the redesign of its website's homepage. And we'll be damned if it doesn't look way more like a blog than like a traditional newspaper site. The clear messages: the online medium continues to assert its precedence over print; even the rich love blogs; and bloggers all deserve to be paid more money. Click here to peruse the prototype, or click through for a larger picture.

Let's play the game "Who said it, and about what?": "It was a silly gimmicky thing." "Ridiculous." "I was embarrassed by it. I think most people at Hearst were embarrassed by it." "I was embarrassed that the Esquire name was on it." "That wasn't great, that was just ridiculous." "This Mickey Mouse light clicking on an off. It's not an idea." "When will they learn, oh lord? How long will it take for them to learn?"

Remember that minor fuss over the curious resemblance of the logo of the Daily Beast, Tina Brown's supposedly pathbreaking news site, to that of the Philadelphia Daily News? It won't go away. The Philly tabloid has now sent a cease-and-desist letter to the one-time Queen of Buzz.

Magazine-turned-web guru Tina Brown has never claimed her design sense was that original. At the stillborn Talk, she opted for a portable format, a magazine published on thin paper that could be rolled up and carried around like a European newsweekly such as Stern. And that same inspiration is shared by her baby news website, the Daily Beast. "I've always loved the look of the European smart tabloids," she says with the sophistication that comes from a media career on both sides of the Atlantic. There's just one problem: the logo of the new IAC-backed website looks more like that of the Philadelphia Daily News, the tabloid paper of New York's rather dowdy southern neighbor.

Do you Yahoo? What that means depends on where in the world you are.Racing to reach markets before its rivals established themselves, Yahoo started dozens of country-specific websites with a frenzy of joint ventures in the 1990s. Its haste still haunts it; Yahoo's international websites may cater to local preferences, but at the cost of consistent branding. Look at this collection of Yahoo logos. Is the Yahoo logo red, or purple? Reversed out, or solid? Mirrored shadow underneath? Take your pick of stylized designs; somewhere in the world, Yahoo has it. The problem is more than homepage-deep; despite countless reorganizations, Yahoo hasn't created a truly global product organization, which adds to its costs and slows down development.

Tacky interior design cliches—like lampshades fashioned out of human flesh, umbrella stands made from bones, solidified organ paperweights—are so over. So it's refreshing to see, in the austere pages of InTouch magazine, that pretend rock star Dave Navarro is celebrated for his more subdued and updated design aesthetic, which includes artwork by John Wayne Gacy. Gacy, you'll recall, is that charming fella who dressed like a clown and brutally raped and murdered 30 young men and boys back in the 1970's, burying their bodies under his house. Killer! Click for larger. [via Gigglesugar]

The surprise isn't that someone created a Facebook group to demand that Mark "Zomberg" — a pun on Zuckerberg and Facebook's famous Zombie app — bring back the old Facebook. What's surprising is that nearly 800,000 members have found and joined the group as of this morning. The probability of Facebook's old look and feel coming back are exactly zero, but the group serves a purpose: It proves that people who claim to be cutting-edge and ahead of the curve hate change just as much as the rest of us.

Here are the screenshots Yahoo published of its upcoming homepage redesign. The big change is that instead of including a long list of Yahoo products and services on the left side of the very popular homepage, there's now a large gray box for Yahoo and third-party created widgets, which will link to places like Yahoo's photo-sharing service Flickr and auction site eBay. The redesign also reveals that like AOL, Yahoo seems to think people will use the portal more if they can check their Gmail there.I'm skeptical, because since when are Gmail users looking for a portal to bookmark as their homepage? We heard Yahoo tried to get Facebook to design a widget for the new space on Yahoo's homepage, but that so far Mark Zuckerberg and company have refused. Kind of like how they refused Yahoo's $1 billion offer to buy the company two years ago, relegating Yahoo to redesigns that seem little more than deckchair shuffling on a sinking ship.

Shortly after Facebook bought Parakey, the Web-desktop startup cofounded by star engineers Joe Hewitt and Blake Ross, Mark Zuckerberg talked about making his goof-off site the "social operating system of the Web." It was just one of a series of failed big-picture metaphors for the tongue-tied young entrepreneur. Facebook may never be an operating system. But is it such a terrible idea to make it look like one? The latest redesign is a virtual copycat of Windows.As Silicon Alley Insider's Dan Frommer first pointed out, Facebook has removed its applications dropdown menu from the top of the screen and put it down in the bottom-left corner — you know, right where Windows keeps its "Start" button. Just like Windows, alerts pop up in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. Microsoft Windows isn't deemed sexy by San Francisco's Web-designer crowd, who brag about having to launch VMware to test out Google Chrome. But, like Facebook, Microsoft has a user base in the nine digits. Zuckerberg shows he hasn't just taken Microsoft's money — he's picked up some of the software giant's mass-market, commonsense design.

Microsoft announced plans for new offices in Seattle's South Lake Union area a year ago. They're open now. According to photos from Microspotting — a PR blog for Microsoft human resources written by Ariel Meadow Stallings, who describes herself as "the person you thought would never work at MSFT" — they look pretty Googley. There's a red room and a blue room, for example. And the Microsofties have one trump card over the Googleplex: Minutes from downtown Seattle, South Lake Union is a much better location than an office park off 101. Check out the slide show below.Click to view

Like it or not, we're stuck with Mark Zuckerberg's ego-driven redesign of Facebook, which becomes mandatory for all users today. What to complain about now? Why, Flickr! The Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site has introduced a new look which emphasizes its social features. Like Facebook's redesign, it's currently optional, but will be forced on all users in a few weeks. (Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/News.com)

A tweak to Facebook's new site redesign, which goes permanent today, removed a link to "recently used applications" from the site's applications drop-down menu. Its got the third-part developers who make those applications up in arms because they say removing the link will make it harder for users to come back to their widgets. One developer wrote us to say "if this sticks today marks the end for 3rd party applications." The "Developer Feedback to Facebook" forum is full of similar complaints. "I already have users complain that they can't find apps again on the new profile after first using them. the latest changes will make it even harder," writes on developer. Another: "Yup, this is a very intense change. And pretty useless from a user experience point of view. Hopefully they roll it back immediately or it was just a mistake."

Time Warner's underperforming online subsidiary AOL updated its homepage today. The biggest change is that AOL now allows users to access their Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail accounts from AOL.com. Along with new ad formats on AOL.com such as photo galleries and video players, AOL also announced new sites for women, pop-culture junkies, and parents of gamers. It's just AOL's latest desperate attempt to recapture the relevance it's lost since it ceased to be Middle America's only way of getting online. Nothing else has worked yet. Analytics firm Compete says unique visitors to AOL.com are down 12.7 percent in th last year, from around 62 million in August 2007 to 54 million in August 2008. And while the rest of the online ad market grew 20 percent, AOL advertising revenues grew only 1.5 percent last quarter.

An eagle-eyed tipster points out that TechCrunch50's Web site favicon, the little graphic which appears next to URLs in your browser's location bar, is off by about 30. "TechCrunch50 startups ideally better at math than their hosts," our tipster quips, before reminding everyone he'll be here all week, and please remember to tip your waitress.

Facebook has 100 million users and around 0.7 percent of them have joined a group called "I Hate The New Facebook" in order to protest a site redesign which will be made permanent sometime this month. The group, founded by a high schooler named Nick Wagner exhorts users to do something, do anything: "THE NEW FACEBOOK WILL PERMANENTLY BE THE ONLY FACEBOOK. THIS IS A PETITION TO STOP IT. PLZ JOIN AND INVITE. Will be changed in a COUPLE OF DAYS!!!" Wagner also uploaded a screen shot of the site's new redesign, annotating it: "The New Facebook is Retared [sic]."Facebook will ignore this petition, just like it largely ignored users when a far greater percentage of them revolted when the Facebook News Feed came out. Why? Because that feature soon proved to be a crucial and useful element of the site, proving again that while Mark Zuckerberg may not know how to talk to other humans, he knows how people want to use his product better than those people themselves. Even you, Nick Wagner of Laval Catholic High School.

On Blogoscoped, obsessive Google watcher Philipp Lenssen has posted an exhaustive list of "Google Chrome Tips and Pointers." Go there if you are, for example, a freeloading jerk who wants to learn how to install ad blockers in Chrome. But I think the best part of the FAQ is the question Lenssen raises about where the logo came from. Voice your preferred theory in our poll:

Architect Clive Wilkinson just finished building his own home in southern California. In a profile, the New York Times calls it "the house that Google built." Wilkinson is best known for his $15 million renovation in 2006 of the company's Mountain View headquarters, which a curator Paola Antonelli at the Museum of Modern Art calls "not offices," but "memorable places for people to work in new ways.” If by "new ways" Antonelli means "grumpily," then it seems Googlers would agree.Wilkinson himself only considers the Googleplex redesign “partially successful.” The Times reports:

CNET overhauled its site right before agreeing to be acquired by CBS in May. Now, CBS has another redesign ready to launch this week. You can probably guess: More video, more product placements. Here's the deets:

At last, Yahoo's not just bleeding purple on the inside. Yahoo's Argentinean and Brazilian portals have switched from the company's longstanding red logo to a purple one, tipster Mauro Borione tells us . Can the main Yahoo site be far behind? The site's red logo has long been a branding mystery.If Yahoo's official color is purple, why is the logo it shows to hundreds of millions of users on its homepage red? One explanation Yahoo insiders have given me: In the early days of the Web, purple didn't display well on the available monitors. Since then, an overwrought caution has kept Yahoo from updating it. The company started testing variations on a new logo two months ago; after trying a different typeface, it appears to have settled on the current version — finally, after 13 years, in the right color.

David Karp's Tumblr, the New York-based blogging startup, rolled out a site redesign yesterday. One of the new features is a Google Map showing where Tumblr users are located. We weren't surprised to see the highest Tumblr densities are in Brooklyn and San Francisco — "sisters in idiosyncracy" dubbed Sanfrooklyn by the New York Times. We were shocked, however, to learn that there are actual Tumblr users in the rest of America — like say Kalamazoo, Michigan, for example. The cartographic evidence:Tumblr users in Kalamazoo, Michigan: