Weekly listserv journal – Pop-up ads and ad revenue

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There was a really interesting thread this week about pop-up blockers.  Basically the idea is that journalists should not go around praising and recommending pop-up blockers when so many news sites rely on them for advertising revenue.  I hadn’t really thought of it that way before, but I’m not sure how big a problem this is.  People who want to block pop-ups are likely to be those who don’t click on them anyway.  So I doubt this will change click-through rates.  Some people questioned whether pop ups work at all, since X10 (they sold those mini-cameras) went out of business recently.

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.

Usability Review of My Lycos

Usability

Note: this usability review as done as part of my graduate coursework at Kent State University.

Usability

My Lycos is a substantial player in the portal/personal site market. The site is owned by Terra Lycos, which is currently seventh on the list of parent sites with the most visits (Nielsen//NetRatings, 1). The site offers a wide range of services, tools, and options, and allows users to log into accounts with other Terra Lycos sites like Tripod and Quote.com (My Lycos, 1). A previous paper (Newton, 1) examined the site and analyzed some user tasks. This paper will also re-analyze the tasks in the original paper, and take a second look at the site, through four usability guidelines from the textbook (Dumas, 56) and five from a popular usability site (Nielsen, 1).

1. Giving the user control

The original paper and a cursory examination of My Lycos show plenty of opportunity for users to take control. Users have 35 possible content boxes to choose from in eight categories. Some boxes can be further customized—the News box, for example, gives users the ability to pick up to 13 different types of news, rank them, and pick out local news sources. The main user control problem is the lack of a central place to change all settings or an easy walk through of the options available. It is likely many users miss that they can customize news, because the only indication is a small edit tag in the news box itself.

 

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Weekly listserv journal – Are bloggers important at all?

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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.

More on blogs this week.  Online journalism seems to be obsessed with blogs anymore, which is annoying, because some really good IA discussions go on here otherwise.  Someone posted a study that provoked a ton of response:  “Perseus estimates there are 4.12 million blogs on eight hosting services.  But the research company estimated that 66% – 2.72 million – haven’t been updated in two months and that 1.09 million haven’t been updated since the first day. The average duration for an abandoned blog was 126 days, according to the survey of 3,634 blogs.”

http://www.mediapost.com/dtls_dsp_news.cfm?newsId=221430

None of this is too surprising, and some argued whether or not any bloggers are important at all.