In a wide-ranging interview with Digital Spy, CNN.com senior vice president and general manager David Payne discussed the creation of the international news network's new Pipeline video service, the future of CNN.com, and CNN's approach to the UK market.

This is part two of a three-part interview; part one discusses CNN Pipeline, and part three will follow on Sunday.

The discussion started with a look at CNN.com's recent launch of a blog for Anderson Cooper 360, a show that airs weeknights on CNN/US and simulcasts for an hour on CNN International. We asked Payne whether blogging, an area already popular on other major news sites, was an area CNN was looking to get more involved in.

"I'll first say it's been a great success," said Payne of the 360 blog. "It's been surprising; it's one more thing that we ask our talent to do, so that's always a challenge when you're asking them to do live shots and write stories, but this one has been really a surprising success. I was a little surprised at how passionate people are and willing to blog.

"We will continue these efforts; that's one thing - communicating with our talent and our producers - but the larger and more interesting thing is how will we relate to blogs outside our universe and we really believe at our core that being on the internet, being a good web citizen and finding content that people are interested in and linking to that content and not just doing your own blogs. Trying to create a 360 degree, to borrow Anderson's blog title, dialogue with users and bloggers. So we'll be doing more of that, particularly as we get in to redesigning and relaunching the website in the next year.

"We are in the process of a really strategic look at what we do online. What we can do to differentiate ourselves, improve ourselves; the culmination of that will be a relaunch of CNN.com. I don't even call it a redesign because our ambitions are much larger than that. We're seeing the same type of confluence of events that we saw two years ago on the video side in terms of what people are using, what they care about, the computers and the chips are getting much more powerful in terms of what you can do and the software's getting better in terms of Flash and AJAX and the capabilities of these little machines sitting on our desk are so much more powerful - how do we really bring all of our assets to bear better than we currently have. In the next few months we'll really be beginning to push that out."

We also asked Payne for his views on CNN.com's competitiveness compared to other major online news sites such as MSNBC.com. In particular, Nielsen//Netratings figures show Yahoo News and MSNBC as having crept ahead of CNN.com in terms of reach, but with CNN.com still ahead in gross usage minutes (a metric that multiplies reach and the number of minutes users spend on the site).

"I'll take the opportunity to correct the picture that we selectively draw our attention to. CNN.com by far dominates every news site including Yahoo, MSNBC and so forth in terms of gross usage minutes and share of online news," said Payne. "Reach is the other piece of it; I'm not clear - I come out of the TV world - why it is that we have this myopic focus on that one metric. It's very different from TV, where we look at ratings, not the cume, the equivalent of reach... So the interesting thing for me is that we look at ratings for TV but we don't look at time spent on the web."

Part three of our interview with David Payne will appear on Digital Spy tomorrow.