Author: Barry Parr

Why shouldn’t Uniform Resource Locators be more, well, uniform? Jon Udell makes an excellent point that URL’s could be a lot more predictable. Shouldn’t there be uniform format for a search URL (e.g. http://domain/search?q=… ) , so you can more easily construct a search? He goes on to say: “Some other de facto standards that could benefit from direct or indirect standardization: /about, /products, /faq, /press, /news, /developers, /jobs”
I saw this proposal years ago, and it’s still a good one. I’d like to see news and information sites develop a set of standards for URL’s.

The regional Bell operating companies (RBOC’s) are lying to us and to Congress and regulators about their business. That’s the gist of an outstanding report from the New Networks Institute. These lies have stifle competition in the broadband Internet access industry and will almost certainly result in local broadband monopolies and duopolies.
The RBOC’s and other other access monopolists have already demonstrated their vision of the future of Internet access. So far we have seen:

• extra charges for access to non-RBOC mail servers
• extra charges for VPN access
• censorship of the information you can access
• inability to serve web pages from your computer
• uncontrolled filtering of your email
• inability to share your line with other wireless users
• limitations on protocols and software that you can use to access the Net or other computers on it (e.g. no P2P)
• arbitrary bandwidth limitations
• metered bandwidth

That’s just off the top of my head. There may be more examples.

A lot of people think that AOL/TW should spin off AOL as a separate company. That doesn’t go nearly far enough. AOL/TW should be broken into at least seven different companies, which may recombine pieces of other acqusitions.

• AOL — online service
• Warner Brothers — film and TV studios, including Warner Brothers and New Line Cinema
• HBO/Turner — television networks, including CNN, TNT, HBO, WB
• Roadrunner — cable systems: just the wires, no production or networks
• Time — magazines
• WEA — records
• Little Brown — books

Each would be an independent powerhouse in its industry and unlock the value destroyed by phoney corporate synergy.

What’s the difference between a newspaper’s front pages and its home page? Front pages are designed by committees of journalists using tried-and-true rules and home pages are designed by committees of journalists and business people who are making up the rules as they go.
It shows in the rottenness of the result.
Steve Outing’ latest column in E&P gels a lot of my concern. I don’t necessarily agree with Jay Small and Adrian Holovaty that news sites should be more like Google or that the front page shouldn’t look like an index to the news.
But we need some guidelines for how to build a news page.
Newspapers benefit from established rules that have been taught in high schools for generations. Because our medium is so new, we’re in the process of learning what works and what doesn’t.
Here are my issues with the way news sites are created today. I’m using the San Jose Mercury News home page as my poster child, because it’s one I know well. There are a lot of other papers who commit these sins.

• Too many brands: why is it that newspapers must create new brands for their sections (employment classifieds, auto classifieds, real estate classifieds, special content sites, local sports team section, entertainment section, etc.). Each brand is an ego exercise and requires the creation of a logo that must appear on the home page. These brands make it difficult for the reader to solve a problem (find a job, get the scores, check a showtime).
• Too many GIF’s: This is the child of too many brands, plus designers’ desire to overcontrol the display of the page. Of the 18 GIF’s I counted on the Mercury News home page, 2 were editorial, 3 were ads, and the remaining 13 were internal logos and house ads, many of them animated.
• Too much static information: A deep, well-organized nav bar makes it easy for readers to get where they’re going, but the Mercury News home page has nine separate static sections. Across the top: other Knight-Ridder Bay Area sites, “channels” (site sections), administrative links (help, contact, etc). On the left: search the site, “Looking for..”, “Our Site Tools”, win movie tickets, search personals. On the right: “Shopping/Services”, stock search, yellow pages search. Across the bottom: “Discover more on Bay Area.com”, and repeats of sections and administrative links.
• Too many nested tables: I didn’t count the tables, but there seem to be a lot of divisions on the page that indicate another table element.
• Too little news: About a third of the home page real estate is devoted to news, and a lot of that is white space.

I don’t agree that news sites should be more like Google’s home page. Google is designed to do one thing and its simplicity is a direct result of that need. News sites have multiple goals and those goals are more complex and information-intense than a web search.
Although I love white space, and it’s free on the Web, news lends itself to high-density information. Take a look at the simplicity and density of Macintouch, The Register, news.com, Google News, the Wall Street Journal, Salon, Arts & Letters Daily, The Economist. I’m not holding up any of the these an ideal just yet, but I believe that the high density of these pages makes them very useful.
My guidelines for designing a news page that works are:

• Use fewer GIF’s.
• Give your sections names (Entertainment), not brands (“Whasssup!”).
• Use fewer house ads and promotions, and make them count.
• Put all the navigation in one place.
• Limit animation to advertising.
• Have fewer fields of information.
• Keep the essential layout of these fields as identical as possible.
• Increase the real estate and density of news on the page.

This approach has the added advantage of making it more possible to use cascading style sheets for layout. This is an urgent need and I’m pleased to see it getting some attention.

The Shifted Librarian does a much better job than I did of expressing why PDF is a dead end format. If you archive something in PDF, what are the chances you’ll be able to get at the underlying content 50 years from now? Roughly zero. XML, on the other hand, can always be parsed.
This archival failure is a major risk for most digital formats and will become an ongoing crisis, sort of like Y2K spread over the next fifty years.

AtNewYork.com interviews iVillage Chief Executive Doug McCormick.
He says “The underpinning of our philosophy is to take our brand name and extend it into other areas.”, but they have bought lots of non-iVillage brands: The Newborn Channel, Business Women’s Network, Lamaze Publishing. .
He claims to have dropped pop-up ads and that their readers use the Internet as a utility and a tool. But they’ve introduced “interquizzals” (I swear it!), interstitial ads in the quizzes that have been the staple of low-brow women’s books since Helen Gurley Brown.