A secret thing that happened this past week is that Cond Nast finally launched a semi-respectable New Yorker website. Looks like that 1998 purchase of Wired is bearing fruit! Just like sister site vanityfair.com, which was re-made in October, the new newyorker.com is laid out all neo-classically (important stories are bigger!) and uses the Tinsley Mortimer of Web 2.0 typefaces, Georgia. But the really earth-shattering news: for apparently the first time ever, the magazine is facing temporality! Yes, folks, New Yorker cartoons are now animated.

The update is courtesy of a company called RingTales; they seem to have convinced some venture capitalists somewhere that the one thing missing on modern-day cell phones and homepages is moving inscrutability. "Print cartoons," announces the company's website, "have always been bite-sized gifts of humor alongside the front page and the box scores... By animating this highly popular content, RingTales transports the print comic experience into the digital world." They've got the license to all 70,000 cartoons in the New Yorker library, and will make you watch a tiny ad with each one. So, basically, this will be the coolest thing on the entire AOL.

(One servicey note, while we're on the topic! The only really useful thing you need to know about the new New Yorker website is this: appending "?currentPage=all" to any of their article URLs will sneakily return a single-page view of an article, as Jason Kottke points out.)

Anyway! Call us Luddites, but do we really want to know the biomechanics of those creepy BEK people? To date, the New Yorker's got ten new and classic cartoons spiffied up and animated on a special Video Cartoons page. At least one is totally ruined. Seriously, that dog who says "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" is infinitely more threatening when, on the Internet, he speaks out loud. In English.

The New Yorker Website [NYer.com]