Design Says to Shovelware: ‘I Need More Whitespace’ — a Design Critique of TIME

I took two lessons from Time’s Q&A with Bill Keller. The first, outlined in Dear Bill Keller, was intended be a short reaction to the piece, that turned into a 1600 word article.

This post outlines the second takeaway, and will be 1000 words. Pictures are worth 1000 words right? :)

Take a look at the comparison between the print and online layouts of that article below.

The print layout is clearly, superior. It’s far easier to read, offers a summary of what the article is at an eye’s glance.

• Multiple Pages The online version requires the user to click to a second page to read the whole article. Yet, the print version fits handily on one page. WHY!?
  There is no newshole online! Stop making it difficult for us to get to the end of the article!
• Ads Admittedly, the print version shares a spread with a full page ad, but the content remains ad free. The online version feels cramped. There are two, small, intrusive ads, that serve to distract from the content.
• Styling is Gone This is a great example of why shovelware is bad for design. The print version nicely separates out questions, credits, and answers with font styles. The online version? Nothing. Someone just copy-pasted the content out of a text document. It’s much harder to read than the article, let alone tell that it’s a Q&A.
• The Sidebar is Distracting Even if Google is my homepage, there is far too much content presented to draw me in. The sidebar is full of irrelevant stuff that distracts me from the article. The clean, minimalistic design in print is far more eye-catching.

The Takeaway

• Use subheads Give the reader entry points. Especially online where people are used to reeading short blurbs of text are are prone to skimming as they scroll.
• Don’t forget the rule about one piece of dominant artwork It's amazing how truly good design never changes. Presenting one place for the eye to center on that sums up the content is a design trait that goes to the way we think – regardless of the medium.
• Leave some whitespace Clutter on the page makes your content hard to read. Just because your CMS allows you to dump in your content and move on, it doesn't mean you should. Giving this article the same amount of design time in both print and online would have helped a lot. I'd bet that the amount of design time for the web could be much less.

Jul 14, 2009 | Edit: Web Design | View Comments

Google Wave: The End of the Wild Web

There will be many – many – blog posts written on Google Wave, and there already have been so many created, that I’m sure this one will be lost in the void, but for whomever keeps ‘The Record,’ add me to it saying: “Google Wave will revolutionize communication.”

I’m throughly shocked by the number of naysayers out there. The reaction on Twitter after the announcement, and the excellent review of the event on TechCruch, was mixed. Some were just as enthusiastic as me, but many have the wait-and-see attitude that, to me, doesn’t recognize the pure awesomeness that is Google Wave. There are only two obstacles Google Wave has to overcome to become as widely used as Google Search that I can see: market penetration and standards adoption.

HTML5

The switch to Wave is going to rely on HTML5, a standard that has been 5 years in the making. That’s a really long time coming. The same year the standard got it’s start gave birth to Facebook, Gmail was still new, and IE was still 91% of the browser market. In Internet terms, HTML5 has been in progress since the middle ages.

Changing the basic language of the web is a drastic change, and we need to be sure that the standard is right. Yet, surely we can adapt to adding new standards at a quicker rate? Because all “modern” browsers are open-source, and have a track record for continuous innovation, it’s inconceivable to me that was couldn’t innovate on a faster scale.

Five years is an awful long time, and it’s incredible how much – of the draft spec – the browsers are already supporting. HTML5 will bring about a friendlier internet – one that feels like a desktop experience. We have the technology to deliver that – why wouldn’t we?

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May 31, 2009 | Media Industry, Web Design | View Comments

A Web Design Critique of the Newsweek Redesign

Newsweek’s redesign/relaunch today revealed a much cleaner, more web friendly site. Many improvements have been made, and you can tell that they’re thinking hard.

However, there’s still room to improve. The essential problem with the site is that it still feel liks a newspaper site, not a online newsorg. Check out the embedded PDF for a look at the annotated homepage of the site and a few quick, overall notes below.

• The design is nice and clean with a solid red motif, but the widgets are sorta hard to tell apart, they don’t really have a bottom.
• I know that Newsweek is a partner of MSNBC, but promoting that connection so heavily may not be so smart. MSNBC should get equal billing (see: Slate and WaPo), or be totally integrated.
• The choice to push the blogs so heavily is interesting (They have a widget and a nav bar). Not bad, just interesting. I’m curious to know if that works out.
• Serious Fun is all kinds of UI hell. The side arrows to mean neutral is just down right confusing , and it’s got very prominent placement on the F pattern of user reading. I’m all down for turning polls into something more of a game, but rethink the UI here.
• Props for having links to other newsorgs. That’s a valuable service that Newsweek is developing. The fact that you get to the other site through a frame is, again, interesting. Cheers to experimentation.

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May 18, 2009 | Battle, Edit: Web Design, Web Design | View Comments

Paid Content = Paid Wifi

I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve paid for WiFi access. Like most geeks, I pride myself on being able to find free internet access wherever I go. If I can’t find it, (like some airports) then web access nearly always goes into the “it can wait” column of my todo list.

Taking a step back, a service that I can find for free elsewhere is not one I’m likely to pay for, and I’m willing to sacrifice timeliness to save money.

This will be the a huge problem for newsorgs who want to go the paid content route.

Actually, the phrase Paid Content is flawed. It presumes that you’re paying for a product. Paying customers of the WSJ, aren’t really paying for the content, they pay for access to that content. You aren’t buying a product, you’re buying a service.

Let’s call Paid Content what it really is: Paid Access.

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May 07, 2009 | Media Industry | View Comments

An Economist Approach to the Newspaper Industry

You should really hear my brother and me argue.

It sounds sounds a lot like we disagree on everything, but sit and listen to us, and you realize that we often have the same point of view, just different ways of expressing it.

My brother is the guy who got me inspired/angry enough to write You Can’t Make Abundancy Scarce. Phill Baker (who has no online profile to link to), who studies economics and engineering at UPenn and was assigned a massive project – to write a 80 page paper on an industry effected by technological change.

I’m pretty certain that his decision to write on the newspaper industry was in part to piss me off, but in reality, I’m glad he’s doing it. It’s interesting to see how an economist approaches the industry from a macro perspective.

He’s asked me to publish the paper when he’s done, mostly to see what the “industry insiders” think. I’ve agreed, so look for it in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, we're in the process of another email exchange, in which I play futurist and defend us blogging “ilk.”

What follows is excerpts from his email (small edits), interspaced with my responses. Any emphasis or links are my own.

Uh, yea, definitely, as to the last point you made. It's interesting b/c this is a 'classic' example of how success breeds failure under the pressure of technological change. There's some fascinating literature in that topic, but the poignant example is Kodak: they were so focused on being a film camera company, that they completely missed digital. They thought they were in the business of film (they were a pretty sophisticated chemical engineering company), whereas they should have seen themselves in the photography business.

Where we differ is the extent of the change. So the business model has lost its exclusivity and newspapers missed the boat. Now they're facing established competitors in their markets with serious competitive advantages and the benefits of network effects through first mover status (e.g. if the NYTimes had been craigslist, we wouldn't be hearing of the end of newspapers).

Newspapers are not going anywhere. Print will not disappear, there's simply too much demand. 15% profit margins (20% is a bit high, actually the industry average is about 17%), should disappear (they can be maintained at the cost of cutting everything in the paper, but that'd be stupid). Circulation will likely stabilize in the next few years as the cannibalization of the print edition by the internet edition faces diminishing returns.

What's fascinating is that their business model has been co-opted by search. I don't think, and the research backs me up here, that display advertising online will ever come close to replacing the lost advertising revenue that was enjoyed in print. The 'national' papers, or those that are big enough to scale and aren't trapped under burdens of debt due (some serendipity comes into play there), will likely find stability first as they can portray themselves as the replacements to the four TV networks. At the head of long tail, they'll be able to differentiate themselves from commodity news through designer websites, cool visualizations, (hopefully) good journalism and (hopefully) their brand names.

• Agreed. Ads will very likely not be able to fund the entirety of a newsorg in the future. I can say this with maybe… 90% certainty.
• Newspapers enjoyed a profit margin of 20% and higher.
• The issue here is largely mindset. Newspapers are used to thinking of themselves as …newspapers. As they realize that they are really just a specialized subset of the tech sector, they'll come to have a revenue model that is more inline with the industry. Which is to say, one that relies on multiple sources of revenue.
• We really agree on your last three points here. Newsorgs need a great UI, ability to inform using data, and to maintain a solid reputation.

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Apr 28, 2009 | Battle, Media Industry | View Comments

LINKS | Down With the AP?

There's been a growing feeling that the AP is not our friend in the media industry, but this week, that feeling seemed to bubble over. We've got some rough numbers to show that they're not helping us, and with the rise of ESPN local sites, the AP is rapidly loosing it's marketplace.

I don't know if I'm ready to sign their death sentence yet, they do seem to have some smart people working for 'em (I look to the New Model for News study and their iPhone app). Yet, it's painfully obvious (after the youtube fiasco) that the AP is a classic case of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing.

These are my links for April 14th through April 18th:

The AP is outdated and increasingly irrelevant; so are Printies

AP thinking of future:http://www.ap.org/newmodel.pdf - Interesting 'atomization of news' but still top-down publishing model. –@GregElin on March 23

• 

  Image via Wikipedia

  Daily Kos: State of the Nation: Newspapers make up 20% of the sources for The Daily Kos, but blogs make up near 13%, the second most. The AP? Less than 1%.

• “On the other hand, I will be gleeful when the AP goes out of business. I’m actually shocked at how little we depend on those jerks.”- Daily Kos: State of the Nation

• Hanging Tough: Financial Page: The New Yorker: This is the mindset the media industry needs to have: take risks, experiment. Either you’re going to fail, or come out on top. Non-risk isn’t gonna make you succeed.
• Why top-down syndication is broken: This is it: the newswire isn’t going to be top down, but bottom up. We’re crowdsourcing news, that means you can’t control abundancy. Take that AP.
• Garca Interactive: How ESPN Chicago sticks another nail in the newspaper coffin 26 and what to do about it: Common sense on what to do about saving your niche before someone scoops it up from under you. My favorite: fire the management. They’ve failed, bring someone new in.
• Journalism Online Just in case you were wondering what a plan for failure looks like…

• “A strategy is a product of a big vision of the market and where it’s going. It’s about abandoning some markets to concentrate on others. Newspaper companies don’t have a strategy. Newspaper companies have tactics, things they do to respond to other people’s strategies. Until newspapers get a strategy of their own that helps them decide what to do and what not to do, they are doomed to see all the high-potential market strategies owned by everyone else. Which leaves newspaper companies to grumble about unfair everything is and not much more.”- García Interactive: How ESPN Chicago sticks another nail in the newspaper coffin … and what to do about it

• “Let me be the first to tell you that saying you aim to be a “world-class platform-neutral news information provider” just tells me you haven’t got a clue about the future, are too scared to make a guess and are hoping someone else will get it right so you can copy them.”- García Interactive: How ESPN Chicago sticks another nail in the newspaper coffin … and what to do about it

• "Instead of feeling diminished by the Huff Post's excerpts, more publications might want to pre-empt the site by serving distilled versions of their own articles. That's right: Even the Post and the Times and the Journal can learn something about how to serve readers from the Huffington Post." –Hey, journalists! Stop getting all huffy about the Huffington Post's "lifting" of stories. - By Jack Shafer - Slate Magazine

Numbers

• Measuring user engagement: Lessons from BusinessWeek: It’s a good breakdown of how to measure user engagement on a story. This is a valuable metric, that we really need.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="158" caption="Apparently, there's more demand for opinionated news than unbiased news."][/caption]

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Apr 18, 2009 | tumblr post | View Comments

BATTLE | Planning a Budget ‘New Media’ for Feature

The Daily Orange Feature Editor Kelly Outram wants to create a special section of the paper for the Summer. The idea is to have something online that would be relevant all summer while the paper isn’t publishing new content.

I’m supportive of the idea, but just don’t think that the DO has the tech talent to really pull off the interactive graphics and code work required … yet.

More importantly though, was my fear that the proposed budget didn’t follow the ‘do what you do best, link to the rest’ rule. So much of the content was general, and not even timely. I’ll share my the gist of my response to the budget below in the hopes that it might give some guidance to college media.

The A1 main story would be about summer jobs/internships in this economy. What students are doing since many places (seem) to not be hiring, any odd jobs, prospects for the future so its newsy/feature. Ideally, we would like a pull-out where each part (decibel, splice, spice rack, tech, health) would be its own section, where it would get into text to what it was.

Use Facebook to generate data for you. You can do a series of searches on Facebook for Syracuse students by major, and find what they’ll be doing this summer. I presume many folks will update their profiles to have this data very shortly, if not already.

The more I think about it, the more I realize you probably don't need to have someone who can code. Being able to pull data off the API might be faster, but I imagine much of this will require manual work anyway. You can just do a lot of Facebook searches etc, and make the data static. Not quite as cool, but still very useful. It would be a major project, but a real 'new media' clip of sorts – 'specially if you can present it in a cool way online.

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Apr 07, 2009 | Battle | View Comments

LIVE | D.O. Palooza

D.O. Palooza is a conference put on by The Daily Orange of Syracuse University. I'll be livestreaming the event throughout the day.

You can watch here, or on my newly launched Mogulus Channel.

Apr 03, 2009 | Journalism, Media Industry | View Comments

Gut Punch: TIME Experimenting With Paid Content

I've had a long time love affair with TIME.com . I'm constantly impressed with the quality of their content, and they have made many progressive steps to move into the online space in a meaningful way.

Today, buried in a press event to announce some new mobile apps, they announced that they would start experimenting with paid content.

My gut reaction was very similar to Zach Wise

WTF! Goodbye Time.com…

-@zlwise

But, then I watched the video, and regained some hope for my favorite online publisher. They're not just going to enact a paywall. They've given them selves 8 months to "experiment" with making portions of their sites paid content.

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Mar 18, 2009 | Media Industry | View Comments

The Internet Broke the Economy

 

I've noticed that I started to think that every blog post I write must be a fantastic piece of prose. Articles that don't meet the 600+ word count don't meet the cut.

Yea… I've been drinking too much of my own coolaid. Back to the shorter, more frequent posting for me. I suspect that it's more valuable in the long run.

 

 

Ofcom Website | Global Citizens and Consumers in the Internet Age

Douglas Rushkoff of NYU has completely blown my mind. It's not often that one finds a completely, world-upside-down, mind-altering … anything. But this is it.

The thesis: The internet has turned the world on it’s head because because it destroys the traditional definition of economy: “rational actors maximizing their value through the acquisition/distribution of scarce resources.”

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Feb 09, 2009 | Media Industry | View Comments

Links for January 10th

These are my delicious links for January 10th from 15:27 to 15:40:

• Why commenting on news sites still stinks: Further notes on the commenting survey results - Invisible Inkling - Conclusion: "Commenting on news stories is still broken. Busted. Stinks. It’s a mudpit. Still."
  Offers a few ways to fix the issue. Among them: let your reports respond to comments!
• 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design - Gives you a really good idea where design has headed now… we've just created a new position called UX designer that is responsible for creating the feel of your product … think Apple.

If anyone knows a good way to get wordpress to display tumblr links instead of delicious via postalicious, lemme know!

Jan 11, 2009 | tumblr post | View Comments

Links for January 6th Through January 7th

These are my links for January 6th through January 7th:

• Mainebiz - A new freesheet practicing the Guerilla journalism style is starting in Portland.
• How the newspaper industry tried to invent the Web but failed. - By Jack Shafer - Slate Magazine - The claim: Newspapers were early to get online, they just didn't get on the open web soon enough.
  The problem: Newspaper structure is inherently flawed for internet consumption. Ad rates alone cannot sustain the newsroom, newspapers have become distracted by video as their answer, and stock price is too much of a concern. There's probably more to add to that list too.
• Public Press FAQ | The Public Press - Here's a radical idea: share your published articles with Public Press, a non-profit that receives its money NPR fashion, so there are no ads.

Jan 07, 2009 | tumblr post | View Comments

Links for January 6th

These are my links for January 6th from 00:38 to 02:52:

• Blogging, a new journalistic genre ? | Monday Note - Pretty strong argument that blogs are a great new form of journalism.
  Problem: they don't make money. Adverts don't value them and they just don't generate the pageviews an article does.
• What is literacy? BuzzMachine - If online journalism is expected to work, the audience must be able to do the following:
  Media literacy, then, must embrace all those activities and skills, not just reading but:
  * knowing how to focus on a need for information and express that by crafting a query to find an answer;
  * knowing how to judge the relevance and reliability of sources - including the PageRank-like skill of judging sources on sources;
  * knowing how to create (and remix) content across all media types;
  * knowing how to collaborate;
  * understanding the impact of facts on perspective and perspective on opinion;
  * understanding the impact of identity and anonymity;
  * understanding the relationship of pieces of information that make up a larger story via links;
  * understanding how to make and find corrections
• On The Media: Transcript of "You Are What You Is" (November 28, 2008) - Jeff Jarvis makes a good case for convergence. The media is now a singular: no longer do jounos choose, video, print, photo, whatever. We're cross-medium.
• Twelve months of top journalism blog posts in 2008 Christopher Wink - Title says it all. It's a pretty darn good list of the top posts of last year. Worth reading through the list at least.
• HuffPo Worth $200M? Em, More Like $2M - Business news | Newser - Sounds like the $25 million dollar investment that HuffPo just got may have inflated the value of the blogging newspaper. Instead of the $100-$200 million the investment was based on, it might be worth closer to $2 million. Ouch.
• Reflections of a Newsosaur: Newspaper share value fell $64B in '08 - A look at the stock prices and market cap. of the major newspapers in 2008.
• The Turning Gate / TTG iPhone Portfolio - iphone friendly photo gallery direct from Lightroom: Cool!
• Lee Enterprises: A poster child for the ownership crisis | yelvington.com - Steve Yelvington breaks down the economic crisis for newspapers:
  1. The internet means long term changes, newspapers weren't ready.
  2. Global economic crisis = less adverts = less income.
  3. Newspapers borrowed when the borrowing was good, and are in the same place as everyone else in this economic crisis. They debt they can't pay back.

Jan 06, 2009 | tumblr post | View Comments

Shrink the Web (2.0)

We're almost done with Web 2.0. The explosion of social networks and the democratization of the internet that made up the Web 2.0 movement has matured. We're in the last stage: convergence.

When we figured out that we could allow true 2-way communication through the internet with Web 2.0 tech, everyone and their kid brother rushed to install comment forms, profiles, wikis, twitter, social bookmarking, social networking, and so forth on their own sites. Turns out this was a good first step, but not such a great idea in the long run.

The problem with social networking spread out to the masses was that there were too many unsustainable, social networks created.

Put simply: no one wants to fill out a registration form. And, yes, it's more than just the hassle involved. Another registration form means another identity online. Another profile to update, another community to participate in.

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Dec 17, 2008 | Media Industry | View Comments

Again, TIME Is Making Good Steps…

I've said before, I'll say it again. TIME is really starting to get this interweb thing. Take a look at the beginning of a Swampland blog post:

Commentator sgwhitefla got me thinking in the last post…

-Swampland - TIME.com

A writer, from a major news source, responding to a commentator!? How very, blog like!

In other news, it seems like TIME is already following a possible business model for an online newsroom.

Just to prove that I'm not a total fan boy: TIME is facing some financial difficulties. But… this restructuring may be a part of the need for a smaller, sleeker newsroom (more on that soon!)

Nov 19, 2008 | Media Industry | View Comments

MobileMe Reviewed

I've just gotten my hands on a full MobileMe account (thanks Ramon!) and I thought I'd take the opportunity to compliment and complain.

MobileMe got off to a rocky start. The dotmac website stated that they system would be offline from 8pm-2am beginning Wednesday evening (Jul 9) to facilitate the transition. The presumption was that me.com would go live at 2am, which did not happen. Me.com went through periods of service and through Friday (the day of the iPhone 3G launch). The system became fast enough to be usable on Saturday (Jul 12, the date

It's so shiiiinyyy

Let's get this clear, me.com is pretty. Really, really pretty. It almost feels like a desktop app. You can use keyboard shortcuts just like a desktop app (replace ⌘ key with the ctrl key and you already know the keyboard shortcuts). You can drag and drop just like a desktop app. Windows slide down just like a desktop app. In case you didn't get it, it feels like a desktop app!

Switching between modules requires a load time, but actions within any one of the modules doesn't seem to incur a load time at all (very cool).

Based on SproutCore, MobileMe feels quick. Yet, there are still a few remaining speed issues. I've tried to upload over 5GB of photos to my iDisk via the desktop interface and the transfer has taken 9+ hours to get half way; reading another 9 hours to complete. (This upload later failed; twice.) Accessing the 'account settings' section of the web interface is hit or miss. Sometimes it pops right up, sometimes it just displays "loading" for eternity. No doubt, these are both symptoms of a freshly launched app, nonetheless, they are annoying.

iDisk

iDisk web interface.

The iDisk webapp works much as you'd expect. It's the same column interface that Finder has. Clicking on a folder reveals the files and directories contained. I haven't figured out the pattern yet, but sometimes the app displays a loading icon you click on a folder, and sometimes it doesn't. Also, the app gives no indication that you've clicked on an empty folder. In contrast, Finder tells the user that a directory has "0 items," the iDisk webapp has no visual indication, and frequently left me watching the computer screen hoping something would load.

The interface does not allow for previewing of files. Click on a jpg and the app will tell you that it's a jpg, but it doesn't display a thumbnail. The system also does not recognize RAW files. It would be nice to have a 'quicklook' like functionality so that a user didn't have to download a file to see what it is.

Preferences for iDisk are extremely simple. You have the choice of displaying a 'Simple Folder Layout' - only Documents, Public and Movies are shown in iDisk home. The app behaves as you'd expect it too, and in someways is more responsive than the desktop plugin. Which is continually having connection issues. It seems that my iDisk can't stay connect for more than several hours at a time – no big deal until I try to transfer several gigabytes of files.

Deleting files on the iDisk via the desktop takes a very long time. But, the process is fast on the web app, and the changes are reflected nearly instantaneously on the desktop side.

In addition, I was surprised to see the webapp lacking two key features. 1) It is not capable of uploading directories, even though it can upload multiple files. The help instructs users to compress (zip) their directories first – what a poor solution. 2) Even though Contacts and Mail have instant search, iDisk does not. erm… makers of Spotlight – HELLO! I'd like to be able to search my files online too please. K, thanks.

I was impressed at the integration, but constantly frustrated by webapp limitations and the glacial communications times when using the desktop interface. iDisk is not ready for large file transfers but with luck, Apple will fix the bugs and speed will increase in the near future.

Gallery

Gallery web interface

Gallery is the me.com interface for hosting your photos. Think of it as the web based iPhoto.

The frontend is the same that users have come to know and love. It's extremely fast, good looking and offers a variety of options to viewers.

Uploads are very quick and the interface not only allows the user to upload multiple files at once, but has the option to add more files while an upload is in progress - nifty!

It's possible to sync Gallery with either Aperture or iPhoto but, in my opinion, there is one glaring sync error. Apple gives MobileMe users 20GB of storage to divide between email, iDisk, Gallery, and Backup. 20GB may seem like a lot but when all of these services are taken into account, the space goes fast. Ideally, MobileMe could offer users a complete cloud storage solution for all data. 20GB is simply not enough to accomplish that.

Following that logic, Apple should allow Gallery to use photos placed in the Pictures folder of iDisk. Not only would this ease the storage constraints, but it would simplify the interface between the two apps.

It's worth noting that Gallery has no photo editing capabilities or instant search. I don't think these are features that many users will miss, but as search is a key Apple technology and web-based photo editing is becoming more popular, it would have been nice for Apple to through those features in.

And that is as far as my complaints with Gallery go. It is otherwise and extremely well designed and extremely responsive app.

Calendar

Calendar web interface

Calendar isn't quite as slick as iCal, but it's still the slickest calendar interface I've seen to date. It has all the simplicity of gCal with fewer pages loads. (Less pages loaded means the app is faster.)

Notably, Calendar falls into the class of MobileMe apps that could use instant search and curiously doesn't have it.

While Calendar has no trouble syncing your iCal calendars, it does not import your subscription calendars. I can't fathom why this is, but it sure is annoying to not have holidays visible.

Aside from the different info panel (see photo, right), Calendar does maintain an interface virtually identical to iCal. This means that Calendar shares the same flaw that I find with iCal - it has poor support for ToDo items. As a simple list, ToDo is horribly uncomplicated and hard to use. There's no way to attach a todo to an event, one can't postpone todo items, and there is no method to group tasks with multiple calendars. Nonetheless, Calendar does what it's supposed to do elegantly and without trouble.

Contacts

Contacts web interface

Contacts should be the simplest app in the suite. Or at least, it makes sense to me that a simple database interface would be ease to do. …so of course, it fell to the bottom of the maintenance list.

My first sync (on Friday) caused some of my contacts to duplicate. I'm not sure why some duplicated and some didn't, but it was sure annoying and not what I expected from a first class sync app. Once I got that problem taken care of, I headed over to the webapp and tried dealing with my contacts there.

As with the rest of the me.com apps, Contacts online is very similar to contacts on the desktop. One glaring thing that is missing the smart contact groups. Normal groups show up online fine, but it's a strange thing to be missing when the instant search works so well. (whoohooo! instant search!)

One strange bug I encountered was that editing a contact name didn't always update the name in the contact list.

I won't say that Contacts is bad, far from it - it looks to be a promising web interface. But, it sure is buggy.

Mail

Mail web interface

Let me start by saying this. I really prefer desktop apps for email – I want the ability to search and write messages while offline. To accomplish this, I use Apple's Mail.app. But, I've used Yahoo, AOL, gmail, Comcast, squirrel mail, and a host (20+?) of other email webapps.

Let me say this, for all it's simplicity and flash, the new MoblieMe email app sucks. I like the instant search, but aside from that, there are a lot of serious flaws.

Mail doesn't import other email accounts. The reason I so like Mail.app is that I can have a ton of email accounts in it. I've got 6 active right now. They all do different things and I don't want them confused. Now maybe I'm unique in that respect, but I still want Mail's web interface to show those other accounts. I was quite surprised to find that it didn't. After all, gmail does it.

Mail doesn't support smart folders. Not too much of a surprise in light of Contacts not supporting smart groups, but very disappointing. But, Mail has instant search!

New Message opens a popup. Really Apple? really? Didn't you learn anything from AOL's mistakes and Gmail's success? Lets keep everything in one window, mhhhkay?

New Message doesn't auto-complete the "To:" field. Granted, I ran into this problem when I clicked on the address book, but that doesn't indicate that auot-complete wasn't working. This seems to be an obvious feature that everybody uses.

I count myself lucky that I don't depend on me.com as my primary email. The webapp is easily the weakest in the suite, and needs quick updating.

Other nifty things

In general, the help provided is very good. Clicking on a help link or pressing [ctrl+?] launches a new popup (appropriate in this case) which loads faster than OSX help windows do!

I did all of my testing in Safari Version 3.1.1 (5525.20), so your mileage in a different browser may vary. I'm very interested to know how IE deals with me.com.

You can set me.com to remember who you are for 2 weeks at a time, a good security measure.

This is way improved over dotmac.

It's possible to setup your own domain name to point to your homepage. That means you can get your iWeb site to live at its own URL.

Users can set how they divide storage between their email and their iDisk –very handy!

Aside from where I specifically mentioned, the me.com is fast. Load times are negligible and speed should only increase as Apple works out the kinks.

Syncing a computer with MobileMe is similarly speedy, I could be mistaken, but it seemed snappier than the dotmac sync.

What I really think...

I'm horribly disappointed with iDisk. I really expected better from a cloud storage solution. For now, I'm sticking with Wua.la. I don't doubt that Apple will work out the kinks, but right now, it's broken.

Gallery, Contacts and Calendar are really nifty apps that are well done, but have several bugs.

Though usable, Mail needs a lot of work. Stick with gmail, Yahoo, or a desktop client.

Now for the million dollar question. Is it worth $100 a year?

• Do you need to host a website or share you pictures online, but have little technical know-how?
• Do you already have a dotmac email address?
• Do you want a really slick way of showing off your photos and videos?
• Do you need a really simple way to sync two computers?
• Do you want a set-it-and-forget-it strategy to get an offsite backup of your most essential data?

If you answered yes to any of the above, give me.com a serious think. Note I didn't ask if you need a way to get your calendar, or contacts, or email, or photos, or data, online. There are free solutions for all of these, they're just far more manual than MobileMe.

I really appreciate the approach of MobileMe. And incase you didn't catch it, the interface is slick! I trust that once all of the bugs are worked out, life @me will be really sweet.

A totally arbitrary rating, for those that need a number: 7.45/10

Update

AppleInsider raises an interesting point that I completely missed. MobileMe is marketed as a push solution for all your devices, and it fails at this goal. Though changes made on an iPhone are apparently recognized instantly by the cloud, changes made on a Mac still need to be synced. That is not a push solution, not at all. I suspect that the next version of OSX aliviate, if not fix this issue with support for exchange built into all the necessary apps. Nonetheless, it is a severe disappointment to not have push now – as was promised. Syncing is a 2nd class solution, especially when it duplicates my contacts!

Update 2

Check out this for a great look at how Apple is fixing the problem.

Jul 12, 2008 | Reviews, Tech | View Comments

Crisis in News: Investigative Reporting on the Web

-FORA.tv - Crisis in News: Investigative Reporting on the Web

A really phenomenal panel discussion from some top dogs in the newspaper business that has a very optimistic view of newspapers online. Undoubtedly funding is the primary problem, but the subscription model seems to be favored.

Jul 06, 2008 | Media Industry | View Comments

Make Money by Removing Ads

The TrustE numbers cited by eMarketer said that only 12.6 percent of respondents said that more than a quarter of the targeted ads they were delivered were relevant. Ouch.

-Survey: Advertisers should acknowledge targeted ad concerns | The Social - CNET News.com

I was on facebook today (a rarity for me) and I happened to notice the ad to the right.

Yes, it's fairly creepy, but that wasn't what caught my eye. Notice the links below the ad? That "Advertise' link is fairly commonly found on sites, if you want to advertise through Facebook, click that and off you go. (By the way, Facebook makes it insanely simple to do that.)

But, the other links are, in my experience, rather unique. The "More Ads" link gets you to the full listing of ads that Facebook might provide you. Users can pick their own advertising. Nifty.

But wait, there's more!

Facebook also has those two nifty thumbs up/thumbs down buttons. Unfortunately I couldn't get them to work. I clicked on them multiple times on multiple browsers and nothing happened. But… I really like the idea.

Imagine a site (newspapers, listen up!) that targets advertising to users, in part,
based directly on what they decide they want. The links should be simple and unobtrusive like Facebook's example.

Why would anybody bother to spend the time telling a site which ads they like (or more likely, which ads they don't like)?

Simple. The site can give them the reward of removing the ads they don't like -- completely.

If a user clicks on the 'thumbs down' button, the site shouldn't simply replace that ad with another. Give the user the incentive – remove the ad; remove the hole on the page that was made for it. Get rid of it completely, make it a sort of "sorry to bother you with that trash" message to the user.

Design

As a sidenote of sorts:

Facebook's ads are great in part because they all conform to a similar design standard that in turn conforms with the rest of the site. Facebook insures ads are un-obtrusive.

One common complaint about online ads that they are not nearly as "informative" as print ads are.

a recent survey of American consumers which found that more than three-quarters of respondents said online ads were more annoying than those in print.

-Hard sell - The Economist.com

In general people don't like flashy moving ads and prefer smaller, Google-like, text ads.

"Ironically, the one type of ads that really work on the Web are the small, text-only ads on search engines.

-New online ads squeeze news pages - CNet.com

Make online ads more like print

Therefore, online ads should be made to looks more like print ads. In my own, non-scientific observations of print newspaper ads, there's an obvious pattern that appears in print that does not appear online.

Print ads, generally, list prices, provide coupons, or tell the consumer when a sale is going to be. In contrast, online ads try to get you to make 'free money.' No wonder people prefer print.

The ads newspapers carry are necessarily focused on a local market. Fortunately, this is easy to replicate online.

Faulty logic

I recall watching a video (I can't remember where, otherwise I'd link to it), where an expert explained the newspaper advertising is struggling because of the way advertisers determine the total percentage of the site's visitors that might be interested in their ads.

The gentleman presented the following logic: if the San Francisco Chronicle has an online readership of 1 million, but only half live in the SF Bay Area, then a car dealership that wants to advertise on the paper's site assumes that their ads are only applicable to half of the paper's audience and therefore worth half as much.

This is ludicrous!

If the car dealership has places a print ad, it misses out on the the half million people who visit the site, but have no chance of seeing the print edition. The dealership has effectively doubled its audience.

Not only can the Newspaper offer a greater audience, but technology allows it to localize ads - automatically. If that dealership doesn't want to pay for ads that don't effect users outside the Bay Area, then the newspaper doesn't have to show that ad to the irrelevant users. Instead, they can find car dealerships that are applicable to their non-local users.

A theoretical step

I have no idea how much of the above is already done (or not done), but I here is a proposition for something that surely is not occuring.

A way to solve this problem:

Newspapers need to team up. Not in the media conglomeration sense, but in the Ohio sense. If national newspapers cooperated on advertising, a user from San Francisco visiting the NY Times site could still see advertising from that car dealership near San Francisco.

The NY Times can pocket the revenue and pay a small commission to The Chronicle for arranging the whole deal. The user gets relevant ads that are informative.

The key here is to provide relevant, local, ads that users find helpful, not gaudy.

Jul 05, 2008 | Creative, Media Industry, Reviews | View Comments

Google Tries Tighter Aim for Web Ads – NYTimes.Com

Mr. Fox said that Google’s approach was different from what Yahoo, AOL and others call behavioral targeting. Those companies look at what a user did a few days earlier to show them ads about the same topic today. Google says it believes that search engine advertising is most effective if it relates to what the user has most recently searched for.

“We are trying to understand what the user is trying to do right now,” Mr. Fox said. “In some cases, those queries are ambiguous, so you need a little more context.”

-Google Tries Tighter Aim for Web Ads - NYTimes.com

Quick post:

Google being smart yet again. This is what everyone should be doing.

In the same way that if I'm reading the sports section of the paper, I want to see ads about golf balls, I don't want to see ads for photo equipment when I'm searching for movie times.

Cheers to Google.

Jun 27, 2008 | Creative, Tech | View Comments

Connecting Another Dot(s)

Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 has posted an article entitled Contecting the Dots of the Web Revolution. A quick summary of his points on how the internet has affected media creators:

1. Shorter reads. People don't want to invest the time to read long articles online. Get the gist of what's going on, move on to something else.
2. Old media needs to credit their online sources. Most major news outlets post their stories verbatim. Blogs link off to their sources.
3. Traditional media is too attached to long form writing. New Media relies on links, and therefore, multiple sources to address a broad issue. Old media would write a book.

Its easy enough to agree with the first two points. It's the last point that is the interesting one.

The obvious flaw in the logic is that there are some stories that need to be addressed in a longer form. Karp specifically mentions books as an example of old media that is out-of-date.

It's not a problem for me to get behind the idea that New Media needs to adopt a short format style. But, the idea that books are going out of fashion doesn't sit right with me. Several points:

• Books make the authors money. eg: Scott McClellan.
• Books are still seen as a reputable academic resource.
• Pick one:

• That's because books are reviewed and their worth is determined.

Strike that one. This is possible to this online too. Wikipedia is a good example of it in action.
The problem then, is that the internet is just not recognized yet as a legitimate source. That's happening, slowly, but it's got a ways to go yet.

• Anyone can write anything online. Getting a book published means that the author has convinced the market that they has ideas that are worth paying for. This guarantees a minimum standard of quality that isn't yet achievable online.

There are some topics that do take the length of a book to address.

Applying Karp's point that people don't like to read long form online, it's reasonable that an alternative, books, are a better medium to present long form topics.

If you have read my post immediately before this one, in which I argue that the print newspaper is dead, it might seems as though I've contradicted myself.The question then, is where does this leave the newspaper industry, which I've said is not going to be able to rely on it's printed form much longer.

In the same place.

Newspapers are not long form writing. True, there are the occasional long articles. But, these will continue to work fine online. The occasional in-depth article is a good to see, but as a whole, the business of producing daily (hourly) news belongs online. The business of presenting long thesis belongs in book form.

Jun 21, 2008 | Journalism | View Comments

No, No, Newsprint IS Dead

Stanley Bing (Gil Schwartz) has written an article arguing that newspapers as we know them are not dead. Bing is a humor columnist for Fortune, so he takes his time to get to his point, which he presents as a list in his signature style. While I'd like to agree with Bing, I'm forced to face a more realistic, and sad, truth: print newspapers can't last. Let me address each of his points:

Bing also brings up a few points that he doesn't address in this list. He argues that both Rupert Murdoch and Sam Zell have recently bought major newspapers: the Wall Street Journal and the Tribune Co. respectively. These industry titans must be investing in newspapers for a reason.

→ Mr. Bing, I agree, they are investing for a reason. The news business will not die. There is an inherent need for the fourth estate; both for the sake of democracy and human curiosity. These rather smart business men are simply buying low so they can sell high.

Bing writes that his kids love reading newspapers; he hints that there is a need for something physical for a younger person to be able to understand it.

→ If Bing is arguing that his kids won't be able to satisfy their "obamamania" without newspapers, he's wrong. They can always get their news online. Faster. From more sources. More reliably – will they look to a newspaper to see who won on November 8th? More likely they will keep track of the election night online. Or at least on TV.

As to the need for something physical, that is a problem. So far, we have nothing better than print newspapers as a physical medium. Trust me, solutions are being worked on though. I like OLEDs.

Advertising dollars are down across the board, and according to Bing, and all the bad press that newspapers are getting means that advertisers are being scared away.

→ There's bad press for a reason. The media industry can be pretty stupid. Yet, I trust them enough to report that part of the industry is failing only if it actually is failing.

Ads may be down across the board, and that might partially explain the loss of ad revenue for newspapers, but there's no way the overall decrease is responsible for the drastic losses that newspapers are seeing. They've lost their crown jewel of advertising, the classifieds, to the internet. An overall slump in the graph should not equal a valley for the newspaper industry.

I've got a bad habit of not being able to read the vocal inflections that people try to convey with text, so I apologize if I've taken any of what Gill wrote too literally. However, the point is important, the print medium is dying. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that technology is not ready yet with a replacement. In the mean time, newspapers have to find a stop gap solution where they can exist online and still maintain a physical product.

Jun 18, 2008 | Journalism | View Comments

How I Want My Data: Locality & Cloud Aware

Boy, do I wish I had written this down first. The op-ed talks about 'syncing.' Or more appropriately, dealing with getting your data on any of your devices (smartphone, laptops, desktops, DVRs, etc…) whenever you want without any hassle.

This is something that I (and I'm sure many others) have been struggling with for a while. I personally own a boatload of devices; several computers, portable devices, and such; all of which I want to stay in sync. I've got a theoretical solution to the problem which I'll detail below.

Jon Stoke's article points out several obvious problems: there is currently no easy way to sync your data, the stop-gap solutions that exist now are poorly done and anything but set-and-forget, and that computers should be very good at performing a simple repetitive task (just like syncing files). However, Stokes forgets to tackle on important issue. Yes, I want my data to be the synced across all my devices. It's horribly inconvenient to have to deal with multiple versions of files and its a tragedy when I realize that the file that I need is not on the machine that I'm working on right now. Yet, the data that I want on each device is not identical.

The bigger issue

For instance, I've got a rather large iTunes library. Last I checked, it's over 115GB. It lives happily on my desktop which has more than enough storage available to handle that amount of frivolous data happily. The obvious problem is that I do not want all that music on my laptop which only has a 80GB hard drive, and it certainly won't all fit on my iPod Nano.

Or, take my photo library. It's as large as my music library and then some. I do want some of it on my laptop: current work, my portfolio, the images I have up on my site; but some random shoot from 3 years ago? There's no need to carry that with me (at least until SSD reach multi-terabyte capacities).

Solution

The problem is not that I need a solution to have all my data all the time. If I did or could, the solution would be fairly easy – the technology to sync two equally sized devices together already exists. No, the problem is that I want certain data to go to certain devices and not to others. My solution, and suggestion for those that can make this happen is this:

1. Time Machine by Apple is a ready-made solution for syncing to devices. It already syncs one hard drive with versions itself. It can even do it across a network. All that needs to be done is to transition it from a backup utility to a sync utility. I'm no engineer, but I don't imagine it would be a very hard task to accomplish. Especially if you consider the underling technology behind time machine.
2. As Stokes suggests, the 'drive' paradigm is very cumbersome once you get more than a couple of hard drives floating around. Changing this to the 'cloud' paradigm would be fantastic.Think about it like this: Google has tons (literally) of hard drives in their servers which provide the space for them to provide all their services to their millions of users. But as a user, you have no idea where your data is actually physically stored. It's somewhere, but you don't actually know where your gmail emails are stored, nor do you care.Introducing a similar solution at the personal level is a logical evolution. No, it's not really applicable to the 'average user' who only has a laptop and perhaps one external hard drive, but for small businesses or power users it could be a god-send.Again, I'm no engineer, but I imagine it working something like this:
   You're home has a network setup, or at least one computer that is 'cloud-aware.' When you plug a drive into the system for the first time, it will ask you if you'd like to make this disk a part of the cloud – akin to the way Time Machine asks if you'd like to make a new disk a time machine backup drive. This is to ensure that portable storage (like a hard drive that's meant to travel with your laptop, or a flash card) won't get data stored on them that belongs in the cloud.

   Once configured, the cloud would be just be similar to a RAID 5 array. It handles all of your backup for you, it presents itself as one drive, if you unplug a drive from the system, or one dies, the cloud automatically compensates – all without you worrying about it.

   Furthermore, the cloud is accessible to all of your devices. It's online, so if you have a password, you can get your data anywhere. Think, Back to My Mac, but simpler. If your device is connected to the internet, it automatically connects to your cloud.

   Not into dealing with a mess of hard drives? Perhaps third-party companies can offer cloud storage for a price. Amazon and Google (among others) are already perfectly positioned to do this. Apple's iDisk already offers an omni-present storage space, and approaches this paradigm.

   Cloud storage can help to solve many of the syncing problems, your data is always accessible, no matter where you are.

3. There is one glaring disadvantage though – what if you're offline? Or what if the files are huge and would take too long (even over broadband) to access remotely?Here's where my solution gets a new twist.I propose a new kind of metadata that I'll call 'Locality.'
   

   This is what I Imagine the interface looking like. Click for a large view.

   Every file has metadata attached to it. It's how the computer knows what date it was created, who last opened it, etc... What I'm proposing is an addition that keeps track of what devices a file is supposed to be stored on. All of your devices will know about all of your other devices. Your smartphone, iPod, laptop, DVR, desktop, and so on, will all know that each other exist. That way, they will be able to automatically keep track of what data is supposed to be on each device – automatically.

   The 'Save' dialog in every OS functions basically the same. It asks you what you want to name the file, where you want to put it, and the file type. A system that is 'locality-aware,' would ask you one more thing: which devices you want your data on. It could for instance, default to storing everything on your cloud. If you're offline, then it stores the file locally, until you can connect. However, the user can also decide which other devices get the data stored locally – in other words – you can decide right in a save dialog where you want to always access your data.

   For example, If you're saving a new Word (or Pages) document, you can set it to save on your cloud and also go to your smartphone. The next time your computer comes in to contact with either your smartphone or your cloud, it sends that file off. That way if your smartphone contacts your cloud (more likely that it contacting your laptop) it gets the file right away.

   The advantage to this system is that you can decide to keep a huge library of pictures safely on your cloud. Where it can be accessed by any of your devices, but isn't stored on them, so space isn't an issue. If you choose, however, you can tell any of your locality-aware devices to set the locality of a file however you choose. You can set some songs to go to your desktop and your iPod, but not to your smartphone.

Apple is most likely going to rebrand .Mac, mostly likely calling it "mobile me." In theory, it will tie the iPhone more closely to Mac computers via a cloud interface. Who knows, maybe Apple is on the right track.

I seriously doubt that Apple will present a solution as complete as what I've just suggested. I'm certain that my solution requires a re-wiring of an OS. Nonetheless, here's hoping that it's a step in the right direction.

Jun 01, 2008 | Reviews, Tech | View Comments

EU States Agree That Inciting Terrorism on the Internet Is a Crime

Representatives of the EU's 27 member states formally agreed today to harmonize their respective countries' definitions of criminally prosecutable acts of terrorism by expanding them to include three new types of crimes: "public provocation to commit a terrorist offence, [terrorist] recruitment, and training for terrorism." The definition of "public provocation" was especially controversial, and it encompasses content posted on the Internet, including not only direct incitements to violence but also terrorist propaganda and bomb-making expertise.

EU states agree that inciting terrorism on the Internet is a crime

As a timely follow-up to the recent news that the UK has jailed 6 men for publicly supporting terrorism through speech, the EU has legally declared that internet support of terrorism is also a crime. This is a severe blow to freedom of speech advocates everywhere.

Terrorists are using the internet to spread their message. I don't deny this at all. The problem with making that act illegal is the definition of who a 'terrorist' is. I heartily submit that this definition is by no means concrete enough to make their support illegal.

Al-Queda is a terrorist organization. Banning their internet activities probably enhances our security. Is Hamas a terrorist organization? They are also a political group. Should be ban them? What about PETA? Should their website be taken off-line?

Fortunately, there is still good news. Although the EU has passed this law, they have not really provided a means of enforcing it. Though the paper precedent is on the books, it does not look like it can be acted on … yet.

Apr 20, 2008 | General News, Journalism | View Comments