JasonMorrison.net

This week was slow until someone posted wondering where everyone was.  Someone mentioned the automatic news gathering systems like Google News, and mentioned that Microsoft was working on one:  “When I first checked the french version, http://fr.newsbot.msn.com, its lead story was a link to a two-paragraph story on a french business site about “Playboy et les femmes de WalMart deshabille” — illustrated with a head shot of Donald Rumsfeld.  For all the early glitches that people reported on Google News, I never saw anything any way near that bad.

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 hate html in emails, and I guess Outlook 2003 now blocks it by default (because otherwise it would spread viruses, which all previous versions of Outlook have been experts at).  Someone brought up this issue from a designer’s point of view.  A lot of the newsletters that people actually signed up for were being bounced back.  Some people agreed with me that even if readers can turn the blocking off, would they want to?  Journalists can track traffic with html newsletters, but users don’t care about that.

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 people talked about a couple of options for accepting and serving ads for a low-volume site.  It was interesting to see a few open source projects on this.  I’ll definitely take a look at these later, because I’ve worked on sites in the past that tried running banner ads and the solutions we came up with were always less than optimal.

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 poster from Brazil mentioned that his paper was shifting from html to all-pdf web editions.  A lot of people brought up possible problems with this.  Bandwidth was mentioned, as was the fact that on an html web page, every story can contain links to classifieds and other revenue-generation ads.  Then again some companies are interested because it’s shovelware–instead of having a staff for the online edition, you can simply dump the pdfs made form the print edition online.

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 poster mentioned that they want to concentrate on cross-cultural user interface design in school, but hadn’t seen much about it.  No one seemed to think that there was enough research/work done on the issue, and I don’t think I’ve really seen anything about it.  There are some obvious things like language but the real problem is how different cultures assign different meaning to signs and symbols.

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.

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.

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.

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 that comes up a lot here is blogging versus journalism.  Someone brought up an interesting project where a reporter was doing live coverage of a trial with in a blog-like way.  A big part of this is how so many relatively inexpensive portable computers, PDAs, etc. are around.  A number of posters noted that it seems like the bloggers are not the ones starting the debate, and that they seem to be a pretty inclusive group.  Others pointed out that blogging is a buzzword and not yet proven; news on the internet is only about 10 years old so its hardly a mature medium.

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.