Tonight at 1 am PT, techies who have nothing else to do — that would be me! — can click onto a brand new tech site called The Verge.

Well, kind of — it’s the result of many months of work by the gang that defected from AOL’s popular Engadget tech powerhouse, set up temporary shop under the Web site name This Is My Next and busied themselves with creating The Verge.

I have another screenshot below of the new site that will be focused on news, reviews and features about tech, and which has been getting a final tweaking all today.

From my quick perusal, it has a vibrant and slick design, with a lot of packed boxes, swooshy movement and plenty of content.

Along with the launch, The Verge’s parent company — formerly doing business as SB Nation, focused on sports — will also transform into Vox Media.

In a chit-chat with Vox’s CEO Jim Bankoff, top exec Marty Moe and Josh Topolsky, The Verge’s Editor-in-Chief, the trio of former AOLers all said they were going to for the big time.

“We want to build the platform for talented native Web voices, in sports and tech for now, and then we plan to grow more verticals,” said Bankoff.

“We want to create more than a news site or blog about tech — the frustration at AOL was that we did not get the resources or manpower to realize that bigger vision,” said Topolsky.

(You’re speaking to the choir, brother!)

Said Moe: “We think this category has not had a large enough vision…not enough has been innovated over the years and we think it is a big opportunity.”

Topolsky said the site, along with a mass of original content from 30 writers, will also be helped by a strong database of information about all its topics and gadgets and also focus a lot on community input.

“What we want to do was graduate beyond the blog,” he said.

(Hmm…and here I just got the hang of this blog thing.)

Bankoff, who would not say how much Vox spent on launching The Verge — my back-of-the-envelope guess, several million dollars — said that costs were spread out between the tech and sports sites with centralized sales and product teams.

Initial launch sponsors are BMW, Sony and Samsung, said Moe, who is aiming to sell “major brand advertisers on the idea that we will be the premiere destination of consumer tech coverage.”

It has to grow past big sites like Engadget to do so, but Topolsky said that This Is My Next had three million unique visitors in the last month and more than 10 million page views.

“We have done that with a lot of editorials and in-depth reviews,” he said. “I think people are really hungry for great content and stories.”

As to competitors, Topolsky said that “this not to necessarily I win if you lose,” although his clear aim is to unseat sites like CBS-owned CNET, Engadget and Gawker Media’s Gizmodo and perhaps even newsier sites such as TechCrunch and AllThingsD (as if!).

“We are going to do the nuts and bolts stuff,” he said. “Somewhere between Engadget and Wired.”

Topolsky compared The Verge to a “boutique hotel — we have the same stuff everyone else has, but it is a much more elegant experience.”

Later, that will change, he promised, noting that “this is only version 1.0.”

Of course — but what else would you expect from a gadget site?

(Good luck and congrats to the entire The Verge team from AllThingsD!)

And here is another lovely screenshot, as promised:

The social travel start-up, Gogobot, has launched an eye-catching new feature to its site.

Called Trip Portfolio, Gogobot is likening the offering (which you can see in the image above) to a scrapbook experience via collections about different destinations on the fly.

Get it? A travel site and on the fly!

But it seems to be more a way to make sharing pages look a lot like a Web version of Flipboard, the innovative social reading app for the Apple iPad.

“We think this gives people a better way to share the narrative and concept of their trip, rather than just through slideshows,” said Gogobot co-founder and CEO Travis Katz.

Gogobot, which launched late last year, has raised $4 million in venture funding from Battery Ventures, Google Pooh-Bah Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors and angel investors Chris DeWolfe, Keith Rabois and Oren Ze’ev.

Here’s the official press release from Gogobot about Trip Portfolio:

Gogobot Launches Scrapbooking for the Digital Age

Unique new feature transforms capturing and sharing your vacation via the social graph

SAN FRANCISCO, July 20, 2011 — Gogobot, the fast-growing social travel site that is revolutionizing the way people plan trips by offering users personalized travel recommendations via their social networks, launched today a new and unique feature, the Trip Portfolio. The first of its kind, the Trip Portfolio allows Gogobot users to create beautiful, stylized digital scrapbooks to capture and share all aspects of their travels with friends and families.

“Our travels are important to us, creating memories that are deeply personal and rich with emotion. Until today, however, people have been limited to sharing these memories through online photo albums where the images are preserved, but the context and narrative that gives them meaning is lost. Today, Gogobot takes the world beyond the photo album, launching a revolutionary digital scrapbook that allows users to curate and share all aspects of their travels, packaged into a super user-friendly interactive, crisp and clean design,” said Travis Katz, Gogobot co-founder and CEO.

Called “Collections,” the new feature allows users to share their adventures in a format rich with color and context; an enhanced scrapbook for the digital age. Users can share their photos, reviews and other details about the places they stayed, dined, and traveled from the Gogobot site. The collections also allow users to seamlessly integrate their activities from other social media sites — including their check-ins on Facebook and Foursquare — and professional photos from Gogobot. All of these elements are pages about each place, allowing friends to learn more about the places you visited, see on a map where you were when you caught that sunset, or even make a reservation at the hotel where you stayed. These elements are presented in a clean and elegant format with an interactive map that allows users to share vacations with their social networks in a streamlined, beautifully packaged layout, while making it easy for friends to use this information to plan their own trips.

“Why waste time uploading dozens of untagged, uncaptioned photos? Now you can share all your favorite places and memorable moments in rich detail in half the time. Gogobot’s Trip Portfolio lets you show off the most memorable moments from your trip and helps friends plan their next trip, too,” said Katz.

AOL will begin rolling out its plans to overhaul its panoply of content sites as early as today, a key part of its integration with the Huffington Post, sources familiar with the situation said.

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong will be sending out an internal memo on the topic soon, said sources with knowledge of the moves.

He will outline how the New York-based Internet portal, which paid $315 million to acquire the high-profile news and opinion site, will essentially close down dozens of its dedicated content sites–some being shuttered completely and others integrated with existing Huffington Post sites.

One example of the first is Politics Daily, as has been previously reported; it will no longer exist as a brand. Its staff is being integrated into the Huffington Post’s more robust political offerings.

It goes both ways, though–the Huffington Post’s travel site will be closed in favor of AOL’s stronger offering in that arena.

And still other well-known AOL brands, such as its PopEater celebrity site and its StyleList fashion and beauty site, will keep their names but no longer exist as separate destination sites. PopEater will be integrated into HuffPo’s entertainment and StyleList to its similar site.

[UPDATE: StyleList's status was shifted just this morning--it will remain a standalone brand and AOL's Shelterpop will become StyleList at Home, integrating into StyleList. Plus it will all now be called Stylist--losing the "e" and capped "L."]

The changes are causing some tension within AOL, given it is a drastic shift from relatively recent efforts to expand its portfolio of editorial sites.

In fact, some insiders are calling the recent vetting of which content sites to close and which to keep as “death panels,” a somewhat dicey reference to controversies over the Obama administration’s healthcare plan.

Also on deck for tomorrow will be letters sent out to freelancers about new plans to hire some–though not all–of them. According to several sources, AOL content head Arianna Huffington outlined the plan to editors recently, stressing the need to focus on staff-generated and more journalistically focused content.

One thing that is not happening is the appointment of a new editor-in-chief for AOL’s flagship tech news site, Engadget.

BoomTown reported on the recent departure of Engadget’s top two editors, Editor-in-Chief Josh Topolsky and Managing Editor Nilay Patel.

The news rocketed around the small echo chamber that is the tech blogosphere, which is no surprise since Engadget is one of the largest sites on the Web covering the tech sector.

In the interim, staffer Darren Murph has been appointed managing editor of Engadget. He reports to Joshua Fruhlinger, editorial director for Engadget, Switched and AOL Tech. Brad Hill is the business director for the properties.

Engadget is one of the largest in tech, with 14 million unique visitors a month. Its main competitor is Gawker’s Gizmodo. AOL also owns TechCrunch, another tech news site.

An email to AOL for comment has not yet been returned.

Asked whether creating a real-time search engine is a viable start-up business, Campbell answered quickly: “No.” His company’s pivot is the latest of multiple efforts in the space; last year, OneRiot gave up its search business to pursue real-time advertising, and Ellerdale sold to Flipboard to help add relevance analysis to its social magazine app.

The exit of Collecta and its competitors from real-time search is remarkable given they had swarmed to the space only a couple of years ago.

In 2009, many entrepreneurs and their investors bet that real-time search was the next frontier, recognizing that search engines were having trouble handling the onslaught of status updates and fresh information streaming onto the Web from Twitter and elsewhere.

Given the companies’ emphasis on speed, perhaps it’s not surprising that they failed and moved on so quickly.

Campbell would not say how many employees Collecta had laid off as part of the change, but he maintained the company has plenty of money in the bank from the $4.7 million it raised last spring from Dace Ventures and True Ventures. Mashable reported earlier today in its story about the Collecta changes that co-founder Jack Moffitt is no longer with the company.

Campbell said Collecta will apply its “very serious technology” to other real-time projects, but it will not become a real-time ad engine like OneRiot.

Who’s left in real-time search? There are still a few, including Wowd and Topsy.

Topsy’s tweet search is much more comprehensive than Twitter’s own, and it serves half a billion queries per month, mostly through its API, Topsy co-founder Rishab Aiyer Ghosh told NetworkEffect via email today. And while Google and Bing also index tweets (and Bing has an extensive relationship with Facebook), they have not fully incorporated social updates into their core search engines.

“With TweetMeme, CrowdEye and Collecta all pivoting out of it, Topsy may be the only real-time/social search engine left,” Ghosh said. He maintained that there’s still an opportunity to build an independent real-time search engine “done right,” despite the competition dropping like flies. Topsy has raised $15 million in funding from investors including BlueRun Ventures, Ignition Partners and the Founders Fund.

Yahoo is set to unveil a major marketing campaign to reset advertiser and consumer perception of the long-troubled company during Advertising Week in New York, which starts a week from tomorrow.

According to numerous sources BoomTown has spoken to about the campaign, Yahoo (YHOO) is–at least with advertisers–going to focus on stressing the size and scale of the Internet giant.

The details of the plan will be made public Tuesday, Sept. 22, at a press conference.

It will take place immediately after a keynote speech–titled “Yahoo’s Consumer Revolution…Round II”–that the company’s new CMO, Elisa Steele, is set to deliver on the second day of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s MIXX conference.

MIXX is a two-day event, run by IAB, focused specifically on online advertising.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz is also going to be attending Advertising Week–during which all the major players in the advertising business gather in Manhattan for a series of events–for a plethora of meetings with big Yahoo clients.

It is likely she and several other senior Yahoo execs will be at the press conference, sources said.

That press event will also include Penny Baldwin, a well-known industry exec Yahoo hired as its SVP of global integrated marketing and brand management in July.

The main message Bartz is set to deliver is that Yahoo is a powerhouse unlike any others on the Web when it comes to online display advertising.

And, in fact, Yahoo–despite all the internal and external turmoil it has undergone in recent years–remains one of the largest sites on the Internet, and is the top player in what is also called graphical advertising, as well as online media and communications.

“The whole push seems to be to remind people of vibrancy of the brand and exactly how huge its reach is,” said one person who has seen parts of the presentation. “It is less Yahoo is back than Yahoo has never left.”

Sources also noted that Yahoo is likely to stick to its plan to push the idea of “your home on the Web” to consumers, which I had previously posted about earlier this summer.

The idea of the Silicon Valley icon being the key hub destination for Internet users does dovetail with pushing its size to advertisers–major marketing messages that will also likely cost a pretty penny.

They will have to–Microsoft (MSFT) has been in the midst of a $100 million campaign for its new Bing search site and will likely spend more when it unveils updates to the service, dubbed Bing 2.0–within the next few weeks.

The company showed the changes it showed to its own employees last week, which was the subject of much tweeting on Twitter.

Yahoo will apparently give more specifics as to the spend for the marketing push at the press conference.

But, many sources said, the company is already out in the advertising market now, buying tens of millions of dollars in advertising online and offline to hawk Yahoo in print, on television and elsewhere.

(Full disclosure: Sources said that campaign will include The Wall Street Journal network, which includes this site.)

“It’s dramatic,” said one source about the marketing outlay.

Since she got to Yahoo, Bartz has continually stressed the need to promote Yahoo products and services more, including in an interview last week on CNBC (you can see that longish video here).

And, in the July earnings call for Yahoo, Bartz said: “In addition, we’re hard at work on plans to reposition our most valuable asset: Yahoo’s brand. Our Q3 plans include an initial wave of incremental marketing spend which will increase substantially into Q4 and next year.”

Also, in a Q&A in the same call, she added more about the long-term nature of the spending on branding:

“The branding and our whole campaign of advertising is just starting; however you have to understand that this is an ongoing campaign so it’s not transient at least for the next year or so. We’re really going to move to reposition the Yahoo brand and Yahoo Company, so right now, consider that as cost that’s in the system.”

What Bartz and other Yahoo execs will likely stress less is search, due to the search deal Yahoo struck in July with Microsoft in which the software giant will take over the back-end technology and Yahoo will sell search ads for both companies.

The company will compete with both Microsoft and Google (GOOG) in garnering the search market still, once the partnership is approved by regulators, with Yahoo focusing on differentiating itself via innovative user interface, design, features and functionality.

Starting this week, just such a smarter navigation box is hitting the market. Called the Dash Express, this $400 product looks a lot like units from better-known firms such as Garmin (GRMN) and Magellan. Like them, it uses GPS satellite signals to locate your car on an easily seen map, and to route you to destinations and places of interest, using both visual and spoken instructions.

But, unlike any other in-car navigation device I’ve seen, each Dash Express, from a Silicon Valley start-up called Dash Navigation, becomes part of a network, connected to the company via the Internet. Each device not only receives and displays information, but transmits it as well, acting as a “probe,” as Dash calls it, to measure local traffic speeds. This information is compiled by the company and then broadcast back to all other Dash units in your area, almost instantly painting streets on your map with color codes to indicate traffic speeds.

I’ve been testing a Dash Express in and around my home base of Washington, D.C., and, while it isn’t perfect, I like it a lot. If the company sells enough units to create a solid network, Dash could radically improve in-car navigation.

That “if” is the big catch with Dash — in order to get its special benefits, enough units must be sold in your city to feed the network with sufficient traffic data. According to the company, for most cities just “several hundred” units would be enough to provide more than half of the significant traffic data it requires for major roads during normal commuting hours.

Meanwhile, Dash, like some of its competitors, makes use of limited traffic data provided by a commercial vendor. This information, which mainly covers major highways, is presented as a dotted line on the Dash maps, to indicate that it may be stale. By contrast, fresh input from Dash’s own network is presented as a solid line.

For the next 30 days, the Dash Express will be available exclusively at Amazon.com (AMZN) for $399.99. You get three free months of Dash’s service, including traffic and other features, such as wireless map updates. After that, the service costs between $9.99 and $12.99 a month. That fee includes the cost of the Internet connection used by the Dash Express, which is achieved using both cellphone and Wi-Fi networks.

To test the Dash, I had to create a tiny two-car network. My colleague Katie Boehret and I each drove the same route in Dash-equipped cars, about 15 minutes apart. The route included everything from the smallest residential streets to large local commuter arteries to the jammed Washington Beltway.

Katie went first, and by the time I retraced her route, my Dash unit’s screen was ablaze with solid-color streets indicating the traffic speeds she had encountered: green for free-flowing traffic, yellow for moderate congestion, red for stop-and-go conditions. Even two-lane local roads, the kind where traffic data are almost never available, were colored in.

Once Dash begins selling, the company won’t rely much on the information provided by a single driver like we did. It will average and weight the information it receives, to eliminate odd results from especially fast or slow drivers, and to emphasize the newest data. Each Dash reading will time out after no more than 25 minutes, turning solid lines into dotted ones as a warning that the information may be old.

I did run into a couple of glitches during the test. For one small road Katie had traveled, I received no Dash data. And on the return trip, Dash tried to route me right into a Beltway traffic jam, even though its screen showed that area in red. The company is working a future feature, called My Route, that would allow savvy drivers to order the device to use the local routes they prefer, to avoid such jams.

Dash Express has a host of other nice features, explained online at dash.net. Instead of giving you one route to your destination, it offers three choices, one of which supposedly incorporates current traffic conditions. It allows you to type in a destination on a personalized MyDash Web page and have that address sent wirelessly to your Dash unit, ready to be selected. You could even have a colleague or friend send you a destination while you are driving, so you don’t have to pull over to type it in or, worse, try typing while driving.

And the Dash also connects to the Internet to perform searches for local businesses, and then routes you there. Plus, you can create your own lists of favorite places and points of interest, or share those created by others and send these to your Dash from the MyDash Web site.

Dash Express finally brings the power of the Internet, and of community information, to auto navigation. If it becomes popular, it could be a big deal.

• Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online, free, at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.