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Posted 3:06 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Tablet Magazines: The Promise
Steve Outing on media usage trends
The Tablet PC is here (the closest thing yet to the portable digital tablet that becomes a replacement for print publications), and now things start to change. I've been waiting for this day. As Stefanie Olsen reports for News.com, some major publishers like Forbes, the New Yorker, the Financial Times, and Slate are working with Microsoft to create digital editions for the Tablet PC. The model for those digital editions will be similar to traditional print publications — that is, readers will likely pay to read them, just as they would a print magazine. Where this gets interesting is that purely online publications like Slate become direct competitors with print-based publications — sharing a new digital medium. Today, periodical publishers still need print to survive; eventually, pure online publishers will be able to compete for paying readers by exclusively offering digital editions. I'm not sure when that day will arrive; it's still a long way off. Much cheaper tablets are needed, that's for certain. (Today's are mostly in the $2,000 range.)
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Posted 2:13 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Check Your Site's Code Bloat
Steve Outing on a handy new tool
Thank you, Adrian Holovaty! The proprietor of the Holovaty.com weblog and assistant database editor at AJC.com was intrigued by the discussion started here about code bloat in many website pages. So he wrote an application that calculates an HTML-to-content ratio for any web page you enter into it: GetContentSize. As he explains in this weblog item, GetContentSize calculates that CNN.com's home page is 8.7% content, 91.3% coding. "Really makes you wonder what the other 91.3% of the document accomplishes," he says. I used the application to check this weblog page. Results: 38% content, 62% coding.
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Posted 1:55 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Offline or Online or What?
Katja Riefler on how to reach young readers
Sueddeutsche Zeitung once was famous for its connection with young readers. Its printed youth supplement jetzt (now) was the best known print magazine amoung young readers in Germany and won multiple awards for its innovative and creative ideas and appearance. So it took everyone by surprise that its publication was canceled after nine years in July this year due to "insufficient ad revenues." The publisher tried to minimize the damage by transforming the magazine to the pure online brand jetzt.de. Aren't all the kids online, anyway?But don't underestimate the print format. Quite a lot of young people continued to use the website. But not as many as the publisher had hoped for. So we'll see a revivial of "jetzt.de" in print tomorrow: Sueddeutsche Zeitung will start to publish a page named "jetzt.de" each Saturday in its weekend special section. Young readers will feel themselves being taken seriously again: the printed page will mainly publish stories from the website which have been contributed by users and editied by the former editors of the printed magazine.
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Posted 1:37 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Seminar Is a Go
Steve Outing on new-media training
The American Press Institute's Andrew Nachison reports that he was able to save his upcoming Digital Story Master Class, which is planned for December. As I reported here last week, his and other new-media training programs are having trouble finding people who can attend due to budget cutbacks and the lousy economic situation. A mass mailing did the trick this time, but Nachison notes that he heard from hundreds of people who wanted to attend — but very few were able to pry money from their organizations to pay.
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Posted 12:57 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Land of the Luddites
Steve Outing on DVRs
San Francisco Chronicle TV critic Tim Goodman wrote a column yesterday that voices my thoughts: Why the heck haven't more people discovered digital video recorders like TiVo and ReplayTV (especially in the U.S., the principal market for the DVRs currently)? The DVR is to TV what slicing was to bread, Goodman says. I'm baffled, too. Why would anyone want to consume their media in the old way, when the new (DVR) way is clearly so much better? What a bunch of Luddites!
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Posted 4:08 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Pew Introduces 'J-Lab'
Steve Outing on new-media research
The Pew Center is launching a new initiative, J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism. It's a venture fund for supporting interactive news and information, which will "support newsroom experiments that advance civic participation in the digital arena and spotlight and reward best practices." J-Lab's principal goal will be "to empower people to be global and civic players by pioneering interactive ways to participate in news and information." Absolutely, the Internet can play a major role in encouraging civic participation. News sites should be thinking more about making their coverage more two-way and less one-way. J-Lab grants should provide an incentive.
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Posted 3:00 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Robert's Success With Dieting
Steve Outing on home-page bloat
Responding to the debate mentioned here in recent days about overcrowded home pages, Robert Niles says he decided to put his Theme Park Insider home page on a diet. "I'll concede that the home page of the site had been bothering me for some time. I'd held to the belief that stuff not linked from the home page doesn't get visits, and the page had grown pretty bloated over the years as a result," he writes.
Niles: "The new page has a clean look and clear hierarchy, and I'm planning to stick with it, pending feedback from my users, of course. I'd always thought I'd been pretty good about following usability rules (variable text sizes, etc.), but looking at the two pages together ... wow, I'm surprised anyone ever found anything on the old page." Editors of news sites with overloaded home pages, take note. Niles has tossed an interesting example into the ring for discussion.
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Posted 2:49 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Pakistan Bans Local Media From Quoting Exile's Online News Site
Madan Rao on press freedoms
Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontières) has voiced deep concern about instructions issued by the Pakistani government warning local news media not to use or quote from reports published by the South Asia Tribune, a Washington-based online newspaper run by a Pakistani journalist living in exile in the U.S. The journalist, Shaheen Sehbai, left Pakistan after being threatened by General Pervez Musharraf's military government. Formerly editor of The News daily, Sehbai launched the South Asia Tribune in July of this year. Many of its stories that implicated the Pakistani military authorities in corruption and human rights abuses have been quoted by the press in Pakistan.
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Posted 10:44 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Story Toolbar Boosts Online Reading Experience
Jade Walker on unique navigation
The Sacramento Bee's design team should be commended for their efforts in creating a user-friendly website. Each news story contains an incredibly useful navigation bar, one that I hope other sites will adopt. Positioned vertically on the left-hand side of the screen, this "story toolbar" presents buttons that allow readers to e-mail articles or reset the text into a printer-friendly format. But then it offers several other buttons to enhance the reading experience to levels not seen on many other sites:
Best of all, each button on the toolbar is explained to the reader with a mouse rollover message. If readers are still confused, they can simply click on the top "information" button and receive a legend explaining the story toolbar's many features.
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Posted 12:46 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Page Bloat Behind the Scenes
Steve Outing on HTML file size
Recently I've written about page bloat — the tendency of major news websites to load up their home pages with literally hundreds of links and content elements. But what you see is only part of the problem, says Gary Stock of Nexcerpt, a "clipping and change monitoring service." Nexcerpt tracks such things as page size and loading times of news websites. Stock says he's seeing pages that are upward of 90% HTML code, less than 10% actual content that the Web user sees. "That's a problem," he says. "Add a jumble of scripted elements, and delays for calls to remote ad servers ... Now it's a serious problem."Nexcerpt also tracks another revealing statistic: page delivery time. The company's servers' average fetch time for the 25,000 pages it tracks daily is 1.5 seconds per page, says Stock. But "within that, we routinely see sites needing 30 seconds or more to push out a single page, and averaging 10 or more seconds per page over time. Of course, online congestion is unpredictable, and some sites are not as well connected as others. But 30 seconds? Remember, too, 90% of those bytes are never visible to the reader! I must wonder whether the news outlets have heard of usability testing — or even 'attention span.'"
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Posted 3:36 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
No Freedom of the Online Press in Tunisia
Steve Outing on censorship
Globe-trotting Andrew Stroehlein, who shows up here on E-Media Tidbits regularly, this time has the latest Internet media news from Tunisia. Writing for Online Journalism Review, he reports that Tunisian authorities have jailed and tortured their first online journalist — who maintains a website that is frequently critical of Tunisia's president. The charge: spreading false information. The sentence: two years in prison. As Stroehlein reports, clamping down on journalists bold enough to criticize government policies is nothing new to the Tunisian regime. What is new is broadening the net to catch online journalists.
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Posted 1:29 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Real Story on MSNBC.com Video
Steve Outing on paid vs. free content
MSNBC.com acting editor-in-chief Michael Silberman points out that my item yesterday on his site's plans to charge for some video content wasn't quite right. He explains: "We are not going to full subscription, we're going to add subscription to our existing free video. The subscription service will offer more content, ... personalized packaging (of video content elements), ... and higher quality (e.g., 300K video vs. our current 100K and modem-speed offering), but we are going to continue to offer a significant amount of free video on the site." In fact, MSNBC.com is going out of its way to promote its available free video news, Silberman says.
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Posted 12:15 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Turning Sailing Into a Spectator Sport
Ernst Poulsen on showing the audience more than what's visible
Normally, sailing is not the greatest spectator sport. Competitions are held miles off the coast, and it's hard to know who's in the lead by maybe five meters, when boats are half a mile apart. However, the 3D VirtualSpectator used by the America's Cup / Louis Vuitton Cup may help make the sport more exciting — especially to enthusiasts around the globe. Install the 13mb program, pay US$25 (a free demo is available), and you have complete 3D-control of all races. You may choose between aerial cams, course-view, upwind/downwind-cams, a camera on the boat, or any other view.You get constant updates on the speed of the boats, wind direction, and precise information on who's in the lead. Don't understand the tactics? Just read the written commentary. The feature that I liked best: after races, it's possible to control the speed of the animation, getting the two-hour event down to two minutes. The question is, which other sports could benefit from 3D-animation?
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Posted 6:21 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
MSNBC.com to Charge for Some Video, Audio
Steve Outing on paid content
(Editor's note: This item was changed after publication to fix an error. For an explanation of MSNBC.com's video strategy, see this subsequent item.)
Second-most-trafficked news site MSNBC.com is the latest to make the move to charging for some of its Web video and audio content. According to this report from CBS Marketwatch, MSNBC.com will begin the charging scheme early next year. Acting editor-in-chief Michael Silberman says the site still believes in the advertising-supported model, but he suggests that a hybrid approach of charging for some content is the way to go. MSNBC.com on a typical day serves up about a half million video clips; on the day the D.C. sniper was caught, the site served up more than 3 million. MSNBC.com follows the lead of CNN.com, which already charges users for video.
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Posted 1:14 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Ugly Cookie Cutter Sites: The Way to Profitability?
Steve Outing on Knight Ridder Digital
Critics really dislike the design of Knight Ridder's newspaper websites. (Count me as one of many new-media pundits who's criticized the company's cookie-cutter approach to its local sites.) Writing for Business 2.0, Ian Mount makes the case for why most everyone hates the design that's been mandated on KR newspapers throughout the chain's Web network. Writes Mount: "Web-savvy users revile the sites for a cookie-cutter design that makes it hard to tell whether you are on Philly.com, which combines stories from the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, or BayArea.com, which brings together stories from the San Jose Mercury News and four smaller California papers. The search engine works grindingly slowly, and the links confuse rather than help."But Mount isn't here just to take jabs at Knight Ridder Digital. He points out that the sites actually do quite well financially: "Galling as it may be to Internet aesthetes, KRD is proving that Web design that's unfriendly to users may be just fine, as long as it's friendly to advertisers and cheap to operate. ... Complex and beautiful may win awards, but ugly and simple might just win the marathon." That's an, ummm, interesting conclusion. But I doubt that KR Digital CEO Hilary Schneider nor other KR executives will want to put up with running ugly-duckling sites for much longer. As Mount notes, Schnieder has loosened the reins a bit and is allowing some local control over websites at the local level.
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Posted 12:22 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Listen to Exactly What You Want
Ernst Poulsen on Web radio on demand
The Danish Radio (an organization that closely resembles the BBC) recently improved its website with a new radio-on-demand service. The site allows users not only to listen to Web radio, but to read a short description of the individual sections of a given radio program, and then add the most interesting ones to their own play lists. In this way, it's possible to combine five minutes of today's news, with a section from a three-day-old talk show, and anything else from the archives. The site even provides pre-selected themes (computers, poetry, or living with an alcoholic) all gathered from programs throughout the week. So far, the service is only provided by the P1-channel, which mostly offers serious, analytical, and intellectual programs. The interface still has a way to go — for example, you still can't save the play list for future use — but the idea of letting users choose their own content is definitely right. A report from IDC on Danish Internet usage reveals that one in five households listen to Web radio.
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Posted 12:04 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Indiatimes.com Voted as No. 1 News Site in India
Madan Rao on website rankings
According to the PCquest Users' Choice Awards 2002, the most popular website for news in India is Indiatimes, followed by New Delhi Television. Indiatimes (part of the Times of India newspaper group) has retained its top position for three years in a row. In the category of most popular portal, Rediff.com retained its top position for the third year in a row, followed this year by Yahoo India. Yahoo India's chat clients were voted as the most popular this year (followed by MSN), and its free e-mail services also ranked No.1 (followed by Hotmail).
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Posted 11:56 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
'Reventador' Paints Everything Gray
Juan C. Camus on online photo galleries
Photo galleries are the best way to show the way the "Reventador" volcano that is currently painting Ecuador's landscape with gray. El Comercio from Ecuador and La Tercera in Chile are using that feature to cover the volcanic news.
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Posted 5:30 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Students Prefer College Newspapers in Print
Vin Crosbie on media usage by the young
Students prefer to read their college's newspaper in print rather than online, according to a 360 Youth/Harris Interactive survey reported by eMarketer.com. The Harris study says that 75% of U.S. college students do read their campus newspaper and that 45% read three out of every five issues, but that only 8% visited their campus newspaper's website during the average month. These findings were part of a larger Harris study showing that U.S. college students spend $200 billion per year.
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Posted 3:36 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Fast Online Documents: A Boon to Sharp-eyed Investors
Steve Outing on public access to court records
Kurt Foss of Planet PDF reports on just how efficient some government offices are getting at releasing documents online. As Foss reports in his weblog, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Friday released the final opinion of the judge in the long-running antitrust case against Microsoft. Trouble is, the release was 75 minutes ahead of schedule — which allowed some opportunistic investors who received the information from the court's e-mail distribution list to do some fast trading late Friday and profit from what was good news for the software giant.
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Posted 2:34 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
What Does Google 'Think' About You?
Vin Crosbie on search engines
Speaking of Google (see David Carlson, below), how do you yourself measure up in Google's eyes? Forget what sites Google retrieves against a search on your name. I'm asking what does Google itself "think" about you? To let you find out, the Australian company Domain Active (no relation to Google) offers the Googlism site. For examples, click these hyperlinks to see Googlisms about the New York Times, the BBC, editor of this weblog Steve Outing, Online News, or even the answers to online profits.(Editor's note: Vin was perhaps being modest in not running Googlism on his own name. Among what the site thinks about him: "vin crosbie is perfectly positioned to discuss why it all does not work." Now that's high praise!)
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Posted 10:49 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
What's Hot and What's Not
David Carlson on keeping up with Web surfers
One of the best ways to keep up with what's hot and what's not on the Web is to cruise the search engines for their top search terms. You can find the top 50 search terms and quite a few other tidbits of popular information on Lycos at 50.lycos.com. Google tracks its most popular terms and more at Google Zeitgeist. Google tracks browsers, operating systems, languages used, and the popular search query information for several countries including Spain, France, Italy, Canada, and the UK.
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Posted 10:04 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Update From Israel
Steve Outing on paid online news services
The Internet division of the Jerusalem Post has long been an innovator in using online technology to distribute its news — of interest to a global audience as much as its Israeli one. Alan D. Abbey, the Post's vice president for electronic publishing, reports on his company's experiments with paid digital content services. JPost.com recently started a paid Palm Pilot news service; is starting an SMS service for Israeli customers, followed by Europe; and is working toward developing content syndication services for the U.S. market. Abbey says he's also looking into joint ventures for employment classifieds and job matching "to build a U.S.-Israel employment corporate pipeline," and an online obituary operation. Never a dull moment in Israel.
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Posted 9:35 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Since Pop-ups Annoy, Pay to Squash Them?
Steve Outing on online revenue models
Pop-up Web ads are annoying. Nothing new about that, but the problem seems to be getting worse (from the Web consumer standpoint), with some mainstream websites piling on multiple pop-ups and pop-unders. Visit LATimes.com, for example, and you'll get two pop-under ads accompanying the home page — a practice that I find to be not only annoying but unbecoming for a news organization of the Los Angeles Times' reputation and stature. Online media consultant Mark Potts suggests that news sites should consider offering a pop-up free environment for those site visitors willing to pay a modest fee. That's part of the appeal of Salon's "Premium" account: offering not only content that non-paying site visitors can't read, but also a less-annoying online ad experience. Potts is right. Even for sites that wish to remain as free access, there's money to be made by offering an experience in which the user is free from the most obnoxious of all the online ad formats. If you're going to have your site deploy annoying ad formats, at least give people an option for paying to relieve the pain.
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Posted 9:32 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Info2Cell Signs on 120,000 for SMS News in Middle East
Madan Rao on wireless content services
The seven emirates of the UAE — including Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, and Dubai — now have a cellular base of more than 2.5 million subscribers. The mobile-phone penetration level in the UAE has gone past the 70% mark. Info2cell.com delivers a wide range of SMS, WAP, and voice-driven information and services in this market. Its Breaking News service customized by country has more than 120,000 mobile-phone subscribers in the Middle East. The company is aiming to have half a million subscribers by 2004. The SMS services in the UAE are available in English as well as Arabic. The average number of SMS breaking news messages received by a subscriber is around 90 per month. EMS and MMS offerings are expected in 2003.
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