More New Cool NY Times Features That Won't Help The NY Times

We remain worried that the New York Times can adapt to the technological and financial realities of the Web era. But give them this -- they are cranking out cool digital features. Today's entry: TimeMachine, a 71-year digital archive of the paper.

The service allows you to leaf through digital images of the paper from September 18, 1851 to December 30, 1922. It's ad-supported, but we don't see this one has huge money-maker -- we see it as a customer-retention device for print subscribers, who will get access to it for free

NYT engineer Derek Gottfrid writes about the project here and talks about it with Robert Scoble in the video posted below.

Also from NYTimes.com: a Mac version of Times Reader was released in beta. The software, which uses a Silverlight plugin, allows subscribers to download and read the print edition on a PC. This one we're less impressed with -- specialized software for digital delivery strikes us as a reinvention of the wheel at this point.