In the interest of full disclosure before delivering this post, I recently left BusinessWeek as a columnist for the online edition. The bottom line is that after 2 and a half years of writing for the small business section, our paths diverged. There’s a lot of good stuff happening at BW, but unfortunately I don’t think the Web site is as strong as it could be–from underlying investments in technology, to editorial focus. I wasn’t too inspired to say anything about the transition until I close a new gig, but a feature I read today changed my mind.

BusinessWeek is posting on its site its editorial picks for "best of the Web".  They frame the list by saying: "with only 24 hours in the day, we have to settle on a relative few as places to work, play, and get things done online. These are our picks for the cream of the crop". Take a look at the list, flip through some of the links, and then ask yourself how this serves the BusinessWeek audience? The listings are vaguely categorized, have no description, and worst of all, as a whole they have only tangential relevance to a business reader. Lets just take a few examples:

Travel is listed under "play", not under "@work". I guess business people only travel for pleasure.

There are more links relevant to personal entertainment than business.

"Blogs" as a category contains a random sampling of high-profile mostly-technology blogs, with no breakdown into business categories, like technology, finance, management, and oh, I don’t know, marketing?

What the hell is "collaboration" supposed to mean here? You’ve got a project management ASP, an SFA provider, an open source depository?? What is this category?

"Research" includes del.icio.us, a great social bookmark aggregator, but not, say, Edgars? Or Hoovers? Or Factiva? Or the US Patent and Trademark Office?

BusinessWeek has a great brand and a tremendous amount of goodwill in the market. Why are they having such a hard time using the Web to deliver the same quality of content they deliver through print? This list has all the hallmarks of an editor who’s had a task to create a "Best Of" list sitting on his desk for 3 months, coming up for review, and slamming out an email to all hands to submit their favorite sites before 5pm. Too bad. This could have been useful.