Click on over to www.washingtonpost.com/local to take a look at the new Washingtonpost.com 'Local' homepage, which launched in Beta at 4 p.m. this afternoon. Surprisingly enough, the design actually does look significantly different from the regular home page, a far cry from previous WaPo attempts to differentiate between the local and national editions of the paper by offering minor, barely noticeable differences for online readers with local IP addresses. more ›

In another sign of how the Washington Post is moving to merge its print and online versions, washingtonpost.com changed its logo today to the same one that sits atop the regular newspaper. The old web site logo has been scuttled in favor of reinforcing the Post brand, a decision that strikes us as both wise and long overdue. Fishbowl DC has the internal memo:

This recognizes what we all have long known: washingtonpost.com is very much part of The Washington Post, complementary and in some ways distinct, but an absolutely central part of who we are. As we rethink how we present our journalism--whether it emanates from the paper or from the web--we wanted to signal that clearly to all our audiences.

DCist has been requiring comment registration as a spam-prevention measure for quite some time now, so hopefully our readers won't be too surprised to learn that washingtonpost.com will begin requiring it on every one of their blogs sometime next week. Steven Goff first mentioned it on his Soccer Insider blog today, and Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive spokesperson Molly Gannon tells us that while registration has already been required in order to comment on news stories on the WaPo web site, they are only now implementing that same requirement on the Post's blog properties. Seems like a lot of changes are afoot at washingtonpost.com this week; the Going Out Gurus got a redesign today as well. more ›

Big news in the D.C. blogosphere! Jason Samenow of our favorite independent D.C. weather blog, CapitalWeather.com, just posted an announcement that his web site has been bought by partnered up with the washingtonpost.com. more ›