Crushing Disappointments

I'm neither on the Forbes Magazine Top 25 List of Web Celebrities for 2008, nor did I make Time Magazine's Person of the Year. Not even runner-up.

Oh well.

There's always next year.

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How Obnoxious Is Your Local Newspaper's Website?

I'm a big consumer of news delivered online by the three local newspapers here in South Florida. Between the Miami Herald, Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, and Palm Beach Post newspapers I can always count on solid reporting and reasonably current news. And since I'm already sitting at a computer most of the day I'll often pop by and scan for breaking stories, or spend more time reading columns and opinion as time permits.

But Good Lord A-Mighty, they sure do make me pay to see their content. Each and every one of those papers' on-line sites is riddled with page-obscuring pop-up ads that have to be closed up, or worse yet, waited through until the ad scrolls back up so you can see the front page or click a freaking button.

(As an aside for the Flash-bashers of the world, most of these ads are what would be termed AJAX, in all of its 99% bad glory. But I digress...)

Now, I sympathize with the plight of the newspapers and their efforts to meet their customer's expectations online. They HAVE to have a web presence, and they have to do it right. That's the competitive reality of today's news biz. And of course, they have to turn a profit or there won't be any reporters or web developers to keep the site up and running, much less produce the tons of newsprint they need to crank out and deliver each day. Meanwhile, their very online presence takes away from the available paying customers who will pony up the cash for a real, hard-copy newspaper. Not easy.

Pay walls didn't work, and thankfully those went away a year or so ago for most papers. Now these increasingly annoying, content-obstructing ads seem to have taken their place in the pantheon of technologies intentionally meant to annoy the customer.

I don't pretend to have an answer, otherwise I'd be a highly paid consultant parachuting in to your local town to teach the folks at the paper how to turn a profit.

But from a consumer's point of view, anything that prevents me from completing my mission of getting to the news I want to see is simply an annoyance. Instead of getting eyeballs in front of the frequently-excellent writing that is being produced every day by their reporters, newspapers want us first to decide whether or not we want to buy a new couch.

Or get our teeth done by the local dentist.

Or sue somebody.

Is there logic in that transaction somewhere?

So, perhaps the answer lies somewhere in the realm of community-building. If your goal is to get people to read the paper, why not celebrate those things that make you unique and that give people a sense that your reporters and columnists are staying on top of the news for us? And that they have interesting things to say about news and life and whatever.

Good writing is always in demand. (Um, how many people are reading blogs out there? And most of them don't come close to what your writers can produce.)

If the paper highlights the voices of their writers, and builds a customer base that looks for the latest from their favorites, you've taken an important step in increasing your paper's value to the customer.

Ads, sure, I can live with ads, the same way that I live with them in newsprint--by largely ignoring them.

But please. Stop covering up what you do best. Let your customers see your work. Get your best writing front and center and we'll all be better off. You'll have a bigger customer base and we won't be stuck choosing between checking the weather or traffic and whether or not we want to get a new closet installed.

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World War II Posters for Design Inspiration

If you're looking for inspiration from the retro days of 1940's America, the World War II poster archive sponsored by the library at Northwestern University is a must! There are some awesome posters over there, and perhaps you'll find your own design idea by looking through their collection.

I'm not sure why, but this one that encourages citizens to save their waste fat for use in explosives sure caught my eye.

Chris Spooner over at Spoon Graphics has a nice article on using these posters for design inspiration and posts some other interesting examples.

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Why Plumbing Will Never Be Outsourced

Cleaning out some comment spam once again this morning and ran across one of the little things I wrote just for fun back in 2005. Hey, it's not too bad!

So, to rescue this post from obscurity and make it more than just a parking space for spam, here, once again is The Hot Jobs of 2005, or, Why Plumbing Will Never Be Outsourced.

(Comments are off on these older posts to cut down on maintenance.)

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12 Days of Christmas via Flickr and Yahoo Pipes

I saw Ray Camden's post about programming a search with ColdFusion for the different elements of the famous Christmas song and was suitably impressed.

I'm not a programmer, but just for a fun mental exercise I thought I'd try the same thing with Yahoo Pipes and 12 searches inside the Flickr database for images that matched the lines in the song. You know, seven lords a leaping and all that jazz.

The results were a little unexpected in some cases, but here are my results. . (Click the List tab above the map to see the images that were retrieved.)

Just a little computer fun on a Saturday afternoon.

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Design and Information Architecture Principles of Web 2.0

An excellent summary of both the visual and interactive elements of Web 2.0 are summarized by Ellyssa Kroski in an article at the Master New Media site titled "Information Design Principles For Web 2.0 Design: Simple & Social".

Whether you buy into the notion that there is such a thing as Web 2.0 to begin with, the principles discussed by Ellyssa are informative of the kinds of designs and user experiences found in many of today's most popular web sites. In Robin Good's introduction to the article he states:

...what separates cute 2.0 cosmetics from true design innovation, is the ability of information architects and web designers to skillfully orchestrate the multiple forms of interaction and engagement that Web 2.0 services and technologies have come to offer: Multi-dimensional navigation, social bookmarking, community search, readers recommendations and comments, user generated content and contributions, video and chat components, grassroots news... you name it.

Ellyssa (who happens to be Reference Librarian for Columbia University) provides some great examples categorized into the different ways that these principles are driving web design. And be sure to check out her blog over at Infotangle.

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Cringely on Why Apple is Stalling Flash Player for the iPhone

Robert Cringely of I.Cringely fame has a thought-provoking take on why Apple hasn't allowed the Flash player to appear on the iPhone yet. (He follows that with his prediction that a touch-enabled tablet device is on the horizon and most of the discussion seems to center on that possibility.)

For me though the interesting part is his theory that Apple wants to drive developers towards use of the WebKit product and away from publishing environments that Apple doesn't control.

... the lack of a Flash player or plug-in for the iPhone....is the single greatest reason why we do not yet see true third-party iPhone applications. Had Apple allowed a Flash player on the iPhone, it risked having Flash -- rather than the Apple-preferred Ajax -- become the dominant iPhone web application development environment.

Apple sees much of its future in Internet-enabled consumer appliances. It's the third or fourth rebirth of the whole Network Appliance concept, only this time mobility and media are added and the mix may finally be right. But this strategy won't work as well if Apple has to depend on a third party to bless its platform. These days the options are to embrace Microsoft (.NET and Silverlight), Sun (Java), or Adobe (Flash), but Apple wants to control its own destiny, zigging and zagging as it likes to crush competitors, hence WebKit. It's a huge success for Apple that people just aren't talking about.

Really? Apple wants to control our choices? I thought only the evil empire in Redmond was guilty of that.

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Playing the Google Game to Teach Search Techniques

A great activity for teaching students how to use Google for effective searches is listed over at The School Library Journal. Rather like a golf score the goal is to get the fewest hits possible from Google while doing research on complicated questions.

What? Aren't teenagers already digital natives who know how to do this?

Not hardly. As the article points out:

...contrary to popular belief, kids are easily bored and frustrated by the Web and are less adept at online searches than adults. They may be whizzes at instant messaging and downloading tunes, but when it comes to searching, they’re just lost puppies, according to “Teenagers on the Web,” a study by the Nielsen Norman Group, a user-experience research firm.

Worth a look!

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Just Another Poor Boy Off To Fight a Rich Man's War

Words by Steve Earle:

Jimmy joined the army ‘cause he had no place to go
There ain’t nobody hirin’
‘round here since all the jobs went
down to Mexico
Reckoned that he’d learn himself a trade maybe see the world
Move to the city someday and marry a black haired girl
Somebody somewhere had another plan
Now he’s got a rifle in his hand
Rollin’ into Baghdad wonderin’ how he got this far
Just another poor boy off to fight a rich man’s war

Bobby had an eagle and a flag tattooed on his arm
Red white and blue to the bone when he landed in Kandahar
Left behind a pretty young wife and a baby girl
A stack of overdue bills and went off to save the world
Been a year now and he’s still there
Chasin’ ghosts in the thin dry air
Meanwhile back at home the finance company took his car
Just another poor boy off to fight a rich man’s war

When will we ever learn
When will we ever see
We stand up and take our turn
And keep tellin’ ourselves we’re free

Ali was the second son of a second son
Grew up in Gaza throwing bottles and rocks when the tanks would come
Ain’t nothin’ else to do around here just a game children play
Somethin’ ‘bout livin’ in fear all your life makes you hard that way

He answered when he got the call
Wrapped himself in death and praised Allah
A fat man in a new Mercedes drove him to the door
Just another poor boy off to fight a rich man’s war

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Marketing Your Bogus Online Degrees

This bit of spam slipped past the filter at work yesterday, and while I initially laughed at the "grammar", on further review I thought that perhaps there is a method to their madness. Here's the copy from my offer:

How many doors will be opened with your new academic degree!

100% legal university diploma will help u make a second start.

Ask anything you want 24/7 using this number (blah blah blah)

You shouldn’t waste your time on classes, exams and lessons.

Just imagine, and you will find 25 reasons to make us a phone call.

So, hey. Let's mix some IM speak in with the message and really rope in those academics out there. And I know it sure appeals to me to see that all I have to do is "make us a phone call" to get out of the drudgery of classes and exams and all that stuff just so I can get my advanced degree.

But you know, I'm probably not the target audience of this message anyway, so maybe the slime ball..ummm, marketing copywriter....who came up with this knew what they were doing after all.

If what you're really after are the people who are too stupid to recognize this as a scam, then I don't suppose grammar counts for a whole lot.

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