MediaSavvy

I’ve been saying that readers should be able to guess URL’s of pages they’re looking for. It never occured to me that URL itself should be able to guess what you’re looking for.
Mark Pilgrim pointed me to “php.net’s incredible URL-based search engine“. If the URL you request from php.net is not on the site, the 404 error page is smart enough to make a good guess about what you’re looking for. It looks at what follows the domain name (e.g. http://php.net/searchterm) to see if there is an appropriate page on the site, then for an appropriate page in the online PHP manual, and finally it uses your URL as a keyword for a search.
This approach should have a lot of great applications for publishers. It allows you to remap requests for sections (sports, business, technology), topics (raiders, ual, cisco), or administrative pages (help, contact, careers) to the appropriate pages on your site or to give your readers a page of search results that meets their needs right away.
This technique is ideal for news sites and other with lots of information in lots of different sections.
The challenge would be educating readers to take advantage of this technique, until they learn to expect it — as they should.
But the benefit should be a stronger bond between readers and any site that uses this technique.

Broadband doesn’t change Internet users’ behavior — a least not in the ways we’d expect. A new study from the UK says that broadband users don’t necessarily gravitate to “broadband” applications, treat the Internet as “always on”, or even increase their use of content.
The UK experience is slightly skewed, because most phone calls (and therefore most dial-up connections) are billed by the minute there. The biggest effect the researchers found was the users were more leisurely in their use because the clock wasn’t running in their heads.
The conclusion of the study — consumers don’t find faster connections or always-on connections compelling benefits of broadband — is dramatic. The benefit are more subtle: a better-quality experience.
I’ve always believed that broadband adoption didn’t demand broadband content. Broadband improves the quality of the standard Web experience in much more subtle ways, making it more responsive and more like…print.
Clearly, broadband enables uses that are tedious on modem connections: e.g. Flash, P2P, background streaming, downloads. But these applications are icing on the cake of a better Web experience.
Here in the US, broadband adoption is lagging our expectations, and most consumers don’t believe the benefits justify the expense. As the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is gutted de facto by the cable and telephone monopolies and de jure by the FCC, the price is rapidly rising. Meanwhile, the copyright hoarders are pushing digital rights management as necessary to “unleash” the broadband-only content that they claim will pull broadband adoption.
Broadband adoption is being held back by a lack of competition, not an excess. Only when real competition drives the price of broadband access down to a price set by the market will we see wide broadband adoption. I doubt the price is much over $20/month. And in a competitive market, there is no doubt that the winning providers could make a nice living at that price.

Dave Winer tells us, “HTTP had to be graspable by a single mind, because it was designed by a single mind.” Similarly, Bob Frankston says, “X.400 … was designed over a period of ten years yet failed against SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) which could be implemented in an afternoon.”
I’m going to keep looking for examples of how simplicity trumps complexity on the Net, because I think there’s something profound (and reassuring) about the idea. I’m also on the lookout for counterexamples.

I don’t understand the numerous interested and enthusiastic links to the LA Times’ story on mechanisms that permit libraries to lend ebooks to patrons.
The LAT calls it “Another Boost for E-Books”, which is fair. But it’s another step in the incremental destruction of libraries.
I just finished reading Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold and was shaken by his portrait of the library community’s embrace of microfilm and digitization — and their destruction of their collections of paper newspapers, magazines and books. Baker had already been pretty hard on librarians, when he took them on for moving from card catalogs to computerized catalogs.
One of Baker’s core ideas is that we’re moving away from a world in which libraries could acquire (or create) information in print and make it available free to patrons until it fell apart from use.
We moving into a world where access to information is metered and where libraries pass the cost on to us. In that world, taxpayers (who don’t want to pay for anything, anyway) are going to resist “subsidizing” the information needs of their fellow citizens. This was the reasoning behind closing the PubScience database (at the insistence of the private database industry).
When libraries start buying ebooks with licenses for a limited number of uses, it’s another step toward becoming retail channels and rent-collection agencies for copyright holders.

OK, I’ve hammered Flash and the whole concept of Internet entertainment pretty savagely in recent weeks. Right after my last screed about Flash, I happened on Homestar Runner, the most entertaining site I’ve seen on the Net and a single-handed mitigation of Flash on the Web. (I wish I could remember where I found the link).
It’s so delightful that it’s easy to forgive its use of a Flash splash screen, and Flash for navigation.

Time Inc. is thinking about making its magazines exclusively available on AOL. This is potentially a big play for synergy, and a sharp contrast to, say, the bickering between AOL and Roadrunner over the “broadband” access market.
According to the WSJ, Time thinks it’s too expensive to operate its web sites, is concerned that they’re cannibalizing print sales, and feels that there’s not enough advertising to compensate for those disadvantages.
It must be difficult for Time Inc. to sell advertising on their Web sites. With the (possible) exception of Fortune, their readers are undifferentiated Jane and Joe Twelve-Packs who live vicariously through the lives of celebrities.
They also know no one’s going to pay for access to the Entertainment Weekly web site.
Even granting this grim alternative scenario, it’s difficult to make the math work.
Doing a deal with AOL means making Time’s “content” available to only a third of US Internet users — a small enough audience to cut into their advertising reach but too big not to be source of cannibalization. And it isn’t exactly going to improve their chances of getting on Ralph Lauren’s (or even P&G’s) next media plan.
Sure, it would be nice (for AOL) to have control exclusive access to People, Entertainment Weekly, and In Style; but what are they really willing to pay Time for that exclusivity? Do they simply propose to relieve them from the cost of operating their Web sites? Will they compensate them for the cost of supporting AOL’s proprietary Rainman format? Does this mean break-even is the best Time can hope for online?
If the way you make this deal a win-win is to assume that Time Inc’s Web sites will always lose money and it might, theoretically, boost AOL customer loyalty by a few percentage points, then each company must value this deal pretty poorly.

“Click here” seems like a vestige of 1995. There are a lot of approaches for wording links; I favor complete thoughts that summarize the linked item. But “click here” is almost always the wrong choice, and there are some interesting arguments for in the replies.
Conventions change as we become more experienced. Right now, it’s still problematic because there are plenty of new users on the Web who are still unclear about how hypertext works.
When I joined IDC in 1998, their envelopes still proudly bore the dated declaration “Check us out on the World Wide Web http://www.idc.com”. They didn’t change them until some time in 2000, when it was seriously embarrassing.
That doesn’t mean we’re entirely sure how to use URL’s in our writing. I still use full URL’s in email , despite their apparent redundancy, because most mail clients automatically link them. That’s a big advantage.
I recently had to decide how to show my Web address on my business cards. I chose “www.mediasavvy.com” over “http://mediasavvy.com”. Although the “www.” is unnecessary, “mediasavvy.com” by itself seems inadequate, and “http://” is still more fit for software than humans.
We’re still struggling with similar problems in writing telephone numbers. When long distance was a special occasion, putting the area code in parentheses made a lot more sense than it does now, when most cities have multiple area codes.
We have moved from electronic mail to e-mail to email in the last seven years. We no longer admonish print readers to “point your browser to” URL’s. The styles we use for writing on and about the Internet are in a state of flux and we need to reexamine them often.

We should think of the market as a commons. The universe of customers, consumers, clients, end-users, partners, prospects, suspects, targets, pigeons, chumps, marks, rubes, and suckers is shared by the universe of marketers, each of whom is competing for the attention of the market.
Every time some twit at a brand-name advertiser or agency pushes the envelope of good marketing practice, we all pay. As marketers have tried to become “edgier” they have lost track of the edge itself.
First, legitimate marketers have abused click-wrap EULA’s (end-user license agreements) to get consumers to agree to things they haven’t read. Second, Gator and Kazaa use click-wrap EULA’s to trick unwitting users into agreeing to the installation of spyware and hidden P2P client, the redirection of affiliate commissions, and delivery of unwanted advertising. Finally, the FriendGreetings virus uses the pretense of email from a friend to get you to agree to install their software and let it spam your friends and business associates.
First, the Direct Marketing Association fights a master opt-out list and confirmed opt-in for commercial email lists. Then, Yahoo, eBay, and others set your account to opt-in by default. Finally, spammers pretend to have your opt-in and insist that you reply to their fake addresses to opt of their mailing lists.
The DMA’s renunciation of responsibility for spam will result in the destruction of email as a marketing medium, if not the destruction of email itself.
Until big Internet marketers agree to a binding, concrete, bright-line code of conduct, they will continue to provide unintended cover to the destruction of the marketing commons.

I’m still fascinated by applications that pull useful information out of link patterns.
The latest is Mark Pilgrim’s Recommended Reading, which suggests sites you should read, based on the links on a page you’re interested in.
It’s the best application I’ve seen so far for finding interesting blogs. The only disadvantage is that it (understandably) favors popular sites.

I’m not going to pretend to understand the issues that Dave Winer is talking about in this essay on RDF, but something he said really hit home for me: