Hello, faithful PlayStation.Blog readers. We appreciate the hundreds of thousands of you that come to visit us every week … and we listen to what you say. To that end, we’re getting ready to make your blog-reading experience better with a radical re-design.

Well it’s not *that* radical (internally we’re calling it “PSB 1.5″), but it’s definitely the biggest set of changes we’ve made since the blog rolled out in summer of ‘07. Take a look:

As I see it, the main problem with blogs in general is that if it’s not at the top – nobody’s going to read it. With a worldwide reader base, a post that lives at the top of the page California-time might be buried at the bottom when our European friends wake up. That’s not good.

So the aim of PSB 1.5 is to get as much info at the top of the page as possible. At a glance, you’ll see our top story of the day, the most recent 4 posts (about 24 hours’ worth, typically), and a persistent link to the most consistently heavily-trafficked post of the week – the most recent PlayStation Store Update.

Recent Twitter updates will scroll along the very top of the page, and we’ll be updating it more often in the coming months. And in the upper right, you’ll have handy links to all the places PlayStation.Blog lives, such as Facebook, Flickr, Viddler, and our full list of links. We’ve also reorganized the categories to make them a bit clearer, and put them into handy drop down menu for easy sorting of past posts.

Finally, we took some of your comments into account with some smaller features such as an “older posts” button at the bottom of the front page.

In order to deploy the new design, it’ll be necessary for us to take the blog down for a few hours on Monday morning; everything should be up and running by 9am Pacific. We hope you enjoy the “new” PlayStation.Blog, and we’ll want your feedback on what else we can do to make your experience better. I can tell you that we’re currently working on a *lot* more features, and you should be hearing about them pretty soon.

Thanks for your continued support and involvement.
Jeff