Webomatica has a post talking about the launching of USAToday.com’s new site this weekend. If this thing truly is what they are saying, it should be a great new site.

Traditional media sites for that most part up to this point have been very slow to even attempt to conform to the openness of the Internet. It seems that many like the New York Times almost begrudgingly added a Digg button to their articles despite the fact that they are getting millions of hits thanks to the social bookmarking sites. This new USAToday.com seems like it will take almost the opposite approach – comments on every article, feeds, open forums, user profiles, votes, and keyword tags – and I think it is very smart of them to do so.

The old guard seems worried that the Internet is going to tarnish the exclusivity of what has been their bread-and-butter for so long, their print media…but they don’t seem to realize that while print media won’t be gone anytime soon, it has started on the downslope and they need to embrace the new way of doing things or risk getting marginalized by blogs and other sites that do increasingly good work and offer all the options that the Internet has to offer.

That’s not to say that fully embracing the Internet won’t have downsides. As Webomatica notes, “spammy and rude comments” are almost a certainty. Spammers, I somewhat get, they’re trying to make a buck, but some of the idiots who seem rampant on the comment boards on sites like Digg just baffle me. There are those who just love to write racist or sexist or any other -ist things for nothing else than to seemingly get a rise out of people…because really, what else can they possibly gain.

Then there are those who love to just write about how stupid a topic or a post is and belittle the people who would waste their time writing and/or reading such crap…yet they themselves likely are spending hours trolling sites just looking for something that they can leave such a comment on.

Okay, I’ve gotten sidetracked into a larger discussion. I can’t help but read 20 things a day now about Digg’s “Bury-brigade” and think about the larger issues in play about Internet anonymity and the effects of “crowds” on the Internet…it’s all actually very interesting.

But for this weekend, we’ll just see how USAToday.com turns out.