Aaron Brazell, of b5media, has redesigned his blog at Technosailor with one of the more interesting blog designs & architectures that I’ve seen in quite some time.

Aaron’s new design allows a reader to view the blog in a traditional blog format, or in a conversational format, or by browsing a list of the best writing he’s done on his blog.

But don’t take my word for it, see what Aaron has to say.

9rules has posted feedback that they’ve seen about their redesign, code-named “Phoenix”. Scrivs even quoted David Krug:

The New 9rules is genius. Smartest thing they ever did. Video Post coming next week from me about why I think this is so freaking genius.

David Krug

Some pretty good feedback – both positive and critical – that continues to lead to an interesting discussion of design…

9rules has redesigned their network pages and added several new features.

One of the more interesting new additions is the “Notes” feature which allows the public to register an account and then interact with the 9rules community as a whole.

And it appears that there is more to come:

The redesigned Community sections are only one part of the full 9rules relaunch, but we feel it’s the most important for our Members and readers. During the week we will be highlighting new features and finishing touches that we are putting on the site. If you notice some things a bit off that’s probably because we still have a lot of work to do, but we are always open to hearing your thoughts and for this reason we have setup the Rulers Community where you can leave us Notes so we can stay on top of things.

CEO Paul Scrivens provides some commentary over at Wisdump:

Last February, I gave a less than glowing review of the old 9rules homepage. I really loved the design when it was finished, but after hearing how many people thought too much was going on I started to understand where they were coming from.

9rules member Paul Stamatiou also has some thoughts:

One of the main problems with the last design regarded usability concerns surrounding communities. The focal point of the redesign, codenamed Phoenix, is the communities section with notes. Notes is a new feature that allows 9rules members and readers alike to discuss posts and news items in every community. Hurry up and register for a notes account before all the good names are taken.

I expect we’ll see some commentary in the hours ahead of us – I’m looking forward to seeing Mike Rundle’s design thoughts at BusinessLogs at some point.

One bit of critical feedback has already been posted at The Skinny:

Reality check number one: Most of the people that go to 9rules are looking to find great blogs on their favorite subjects… not to be part of the community. Ergo, good content needs to be their first prerogative. Not the community.

Some great comments and discussion between Scrivs and others at The Skinny as well.

Gawker Media has rolled out new designs at Gawker and Gizmodo. Good looking layouts.

But Pearson is still the best designer in the house.

9rules member Paul Stamatiou has released Deviance, a theme for WordPress based off of k2:

Deviance is my name for my previous K2 mod. It is a narrow and clean single column K2-based theme for WordPress. It was created upon the latest stable K2 release, 167. Deviance supports the following WordPress plugins out of the box: Brian’s Latest Comments, Related Entries, Ultimate Tag Warrior, Akismet Spam Count, Extended Live Archives and flickrRSS. Deviance also has built-in social bookmarking buttons on each permalink page.

Deviance is a sharp theme…

Barry Bell’s wurk.net network has some new eye candy:

However, this one is good. Very, very good. Apart from being one of the slickest network hub sites out there, it does everything a hub site should do. Like…

• a full network-wide search that covers both the core network blogs, and the independent network blogs
• a main blog that provides network news and content roundups
• featured network content and a ‘river of content’ aggregated from across the entire network
• a categorised directory listing of all blogs in the network
• a detailed page for each network blog

Instablogs has redesigned CIO Central:

We already told you about our many technology blogs but we forgot to mention an important blog, namely CIOCENTRAL, our blog for CIOs. CIOCENTRAL provides essential reading for the CIO, covering topics ranging fom Digital Security and Enterprise Software to Project Management and Open Source Software.

Over at The Blog Herald, we’re asking how to improve the site. It’s a great chance to weigh in on the future direction, design, and news coverage at TBH.

Instablogs has redesigned Instatravel and One Dollar Drip.

The Bloggy Network has unveiled a new design:

As you can tell we’ve decided to incorporate a snazzy new design thanks to our wonderful designer Elena. Anyway, as you can tell we’ve improved the image here quite a bit. That really wasn’t too hard since there wasn’t much to see here before. Now there’s something a little bit nicer to look at.

Anyway, we’ve got a couple of big sites joining the network very soon. We’re growing a lot faster than most people would think. We’re getting it done slowly but surely. I look forward to sharing the good news of the new joins to the network soon