JasonMorrison.net

As part of a class project I’ve been reading the Online-News mailing list and responding to some of the issues and discussion brought up there.

One of the topics this week was minipayments.  Some have seen these and micropayments as the web’s future in terms of revenue–many small charges added up without requiring users to jump through hoops.  Minipayments fall more into the $5 range.  The Online Publishers’ Association did a study saying these are bringing in less than $15 million/year, but it was pointed out that this low figure may be because they aren’t offered by many sites.

As part of a class project I’ve been reading the Online-News mailing list and responding to some of the issues and discussion brought up there.

A huge thread which began last week on the 15^th but I didn’t read until now is about what kind of standards sites are using in their code.  The original poster is trying to use XHTML and CSS, but noticed that no other news sites he looked at validated as XHTML.  His question was why.  A few ideas came up-if you use CSS for page layout, anyone using an older browser will lose all of your layout and most likely just see a bunch of text.  Someone else pointed out that this could actually be a good thing-users with disabilities, for example, who surf the web with text-reading software, won’t see your layout anyway and a bunch of text is more useful for them.  Ditto for Palm users and people surfing on tiny displays.

I think the real reason people aren’t using valid XHTML and CSS is that it’s a lot of work to set up and get working exactly right.  Most places are not putting money into things like that, they’re laying people off and hiring people who will do data-entry type tasks on the cheap as opposed to building a system.  Plus a lot of places spent tons of money on their current systems just 3 or 4 years ago.

Another issue brought up was standards for delivering streaming video.  One poster recommended using Flash, which is something I read somewhere else before, and it does sound like a great idea.  Flash can serve mp4 video, doesn’t pop up with ads or offers for a pro version like RealPlayer and QuickTime, and is already installed in most browsers.  A lot of posters in the group are not big Flash fans, because it’s a semi-closed proprietary standard, but there doesn’t seem to be a better alternative to streaming video over the web.  One poster offered a few places where Flash was just about the only tool that could do what the site designers wanted it to do, but one in particular (http://www.msnbc.com/modules/yip02/) made some posters scoff.

Also, no matter what standard you decide on using, there’s some browser that doesn’t work the same way the others work.  And standards constantly change.  The question came down to how much should content be separated from presentation (so that different presentations are available for different devices), and how much should presentation be standardized (so that the same presentation will work to some degree on different devices)?  There was an interesting article here: http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000266.php.

Kent State University School of Library Science Web Site

Site Design

The most basic level of usability is accessibility. Although it is beyond the scope of this analysis to consider problems that disabled users may have, it is useful to look at the site through the eyes of the Javascript-disabled or the DSL-disabled, those who do not have the latest, most up-to-date browsers with all the options turned on. One thing in the KSU SLIS site’s favor is the lack of any necessary plugins, like Flash or QuickTime VR, which some users might not have installed. The home page and the site’s navigation bar do use Javascript, which some users may have turned off, but disabling Javascript does not completely break the site’s navigation. It does, however, mean the users only have access to the first level of the navigation hierarchy from the homepage, which might make it a little more difficult to figure out which section is the appropriate one to go to.

On the plus side, the site is fairly slow-connection friendly. The entire homepage, including the Javascript rollover images, is only about 163K. The site makes appropriate use of alt tags for images, so anyone using a text-only browser like Lynx or surfing with images off will still be able to get around. Again, they will miss the descriptive second-tier categories for each section. The site is fully navigable in a full-text browser, but there are two problems: first, the homepage has no descriptive text, and second, there’s not always a link back to the homepage, probably because the image that links back has not alt text on most pages.

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As part of a class project I’ve been reading the Online-News mailing list and responding to some of the issues and discussion brought up there.

An interesting thread about Wikis started this week.  Wikis are web sites that allow users to write, update and maintain the content, usually stored in some sort of database.  The idea of letting just about anyone update content on your site might seem crazy, but the idea is that since anyone can update it, and backups are kept, there are likely to be many more people willing to fix a bad page than make the page bad in the first place.  Perhaps the best-known one is http://www.wikipedia.org/.  This site is probably a librarian’s nightmare, since everything, from the indexing terms to the source citation (if any), is left up to whoever wanders by.  It seems to work fairly well, though.  I wouldn’t put anyones life on the line, but if I wanted some background on a subject Wikipedia is as good a place to start as any.

The thread started when someone posted the problems they were having in choosing and starting one.  Wikis are pretty easy to program, which means just about everyone has written their own, and many of them concentrate on anything but good architecture.  Other posters noted that they found Wikis to be useful internally, but no one here seemed to be using them with the public in a big way.

Apparently posting and reading here can pay off.  Someone mentioned an article about Rosalind Resnick at http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/jun2003/sb20030625_5361.htm.  She started an opt-in email marketing company that she later sold for $111 million in cash.  Years ago she used to post to this group.  I really miss the Internet boom.  I think I may have missed my chance to put together a couple of ideas and a web site, and then cash in.

As part of a class project I’ve been reading the Online-News mailing list and responding to some of the issues and discussion brought up there.

I went ahead and looked up some info on RSS.  It seems pretty interesting-details can be found at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss.  RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, a common format for content you want others to be able to pick up through their news sites, blogs, and web applications.  It’s a flavor of XML, which allows you to set up different channels and different items within the channel, with some other standard tags like creator and description.  It’s nice because it’s an open format, and it seems to be getting pretty big.  Like so many other things, there’s a set of dueling specifications for it, though some are backwards compatible with each other which is nice.  If more sites keep using it, I’m sure Microsoft will ad their own proprietary version to Office any day now.

One thing that’s interesting about this list is that people use it to announce papers, books, and projects.  For example, there’s “The current status and potential development of online news consumption: A structural approach” by An Nguyen at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_9/nguyen/index.html, which makes the bland assertion that more news web sites are going up and more people are getting their news from the web.  That one was mentioned by someone who had read it; other times the writers themselves make announcements like Robert Berkman, who co-wrote Digital Dilemmas: Ethical Issues for Online Media Professionals.  This book likes kind of interesting, just because I’ve read a few journalism ethics books and they usually don’t have much on online journalism.  There are some important issues which are particularly pressing online as opposed to print–like reader privacy.

In other threads, some people have been discussing a poster called “JOE BIALEK” who seems to have appeared out of nowhere to write huge diatribes.  The name looked familiar to me and some of the other posters confirmed my suspicion-he’s a troll from Usenet and other forums who tries to start fights.  There was an interesting meta-thread about how these sorts of things happen.  Another thread was about the use of mobile phone cameras by reporters.  The first poster talked about how great it could be, but others quickly added there could be ethical concerns.  It might not be a great idea to let your reporter (who’s not a trained news photographer) take insensitive pictures of victims and post them without going through an editor first.

As part of a class project I’ve been reading the Online-News mailing list and responding to some of the issues and discussion brought up there.

This week did not see a great deal of discussion per se.  One poster asked for useful/innovative tools that CMS (content management systems) have.  The only response so far said that flexibility was the best feature his CMS had, so that his programmers could add/alter modules without paying a bunch of money for consultants.   In his site, they added RSS feeds and added a simple interface for editors to use.

Last week there was a long thread that started when someone asked which blogging software they should use for a student project on a Windows platform. One suggestion was Moveable Type, and there was some back-and forth about how easy it is to make changes to built-in templates with CSS.  Typepad and Pmachine were two alternatives that were also mentioned.  There was some talk about integrating it into a CMS and even using Flash (which one writer pointed out, might be silly if most of the content is just text).  Several people talked about the difficulties they had setting up MT for multiple authors, and gave some suggestions to make it easier on the original poster if they decide to go that route.  RSS was also mentioned, which is something I know little about and should probably look into.