Category: Analysis

When I built Coastsider, my goal was to make the design, and the underlying markup, as simple as possible. I wanted to do the layout with CSS only — no tables.

Tables brought back too many memories for me of the original News.com site, which was a twisted mass of nested tables designed to over-determine how the site looked on the reader’s computer.

Right before releasing Coastsider, I decided I was unable to assure the site would look right without a basic three-column table layout. I held my nose and added the table. But at least I wasn’t nesting my table.s

Today, I came across an intractable problem that forced me to nest a second table inside my layout. I’m sure the problem is that I don’t know CSS well enough to fix this without nested tables. But I’m out of ideas and out of time. Nested tables beat the alternative, which looks awful.

News sites have been wringing their hands about whether blogging is journalism and whether newspapers should let their reporters blog.
They’re missing the most important point about blogging. Suddenly, millions of their readers now have better-managed web sites that are better integrated with the Web than any online news Web site.
I’m not saying that the Tribune Company should rush out and buy WordPress for their newspapers. But the blogosphere has evolved into a sophisticated network that online publishers should emulate and build upon. I’ve been discussing the elements of this network in this series:

• RSS feeds put your headlines on readers’ desktops, especially the most influential 1% of Web users — the people who can drive traffic to your site. Don’t worry that you can’t control it or measure it. Trust people to find you.
• Comments let your reader participate directly in the reporting process, amplifying, correcting, and just blowing off steam. Letters to the editor and separate bulletin boards now seem absurd.
• Archives should no longer be in a separate database. Your Web site should be your archives, which should be free and open to anyone who wants to read or link to your news. Why shouldn’t readers be able to search your archives using Google? Think before you answer that question.
• Trackback points to people who point to you, creating context for every news story you publish, and giving back traffic to people who are pointing their readers to you.
• Your community should be the focus of your site. And you should be integrating your site with bloggers and other sites in your community.

Blogs have changed the way people use use the Web and the way they create Web sites. The online news industry has the most to learn and the most to gain from thinking like bloggers. Whether news sites blog, or whether they accept blogging as journalism is immaterial.

I’ve been pretty tough on newspapers’ Web sites for the last week or so. But newspapers actually do a pretty good job compared to the typical television broadcaster. A little later, I plan to write about why publishers are so much better equipped than broadcasters for the Web.
For now, let me say that Fox News just redesigned their site, and the result is godawful.
Supposedly, it’s designed to be “high bandwidth”, but all I know is that it performs like a pig on my DSL line. And by “pig,” I don’t mean Babe. I mean a big, fat sack of lard.
To be fair, Fox News Channel isn’t exactly the most elegant stop on the TV dial, either.
But…oh, the humanity!
With its pseudowindows swimming in a blue background; its pop-up menus that don’t work on a Mac; its jumble of news with ads with promos that make it impossible to tell who paid whom for what; the “Fox Connect” window where the ad cannot be separated from the content; its obviously ghost-written “blogs”; a creepy above-the-fold file photo illustration of the Supreme Court looming like an evil presence; its spammy text ads for viagra, diets, and offers to “crush old age”; and its bright-yellow bigger-than-Fox’s-logo terror Alert Status, the Fox News Web site looks like a porn site without the tits.

Every blog is part of multiple communities. MediaSavvy is part of the online publishing, news, telecom, and Web theory communities. You can tell by looking at the list of blogs (the blogroll) on my nav bar. I link to those guys and many of them link back to me.

Now, imagine a newspaper Web site with a blogroll. Jonathan Dube says newspapers should give community members blogs on their site, but he doesn’t say that newspapers should promote local weblogs that they don’t host.

The typical newspaper web site’s home page is a roach motel: readers can enter, but they can’t get out, unless they click on an ad. Some news stories may provide a few relevant links in a news story, but it feels like noblesse oblige.

I could make a compelling argument that newspaper publishers should support local bloggers for the karma alone, but why bother? I know most publishers are less interested in karma than in cash. And most publishers would make more money if they shared the wealth of their traffic with local bloggers.

On the Web, karma translates into reputation really quickly. And reputation is the old-fashioned word for the Holy Grail of nineties marketing — branding.

A newspaper may be a dominant media brand in its community, with boxes on every street corner and a wad of newsprint plunked on a third of the doorsteps every morning. But what is its share of its community’s Web diet? I don’t know what things are like in your home market, but here in the Bay Area, the big three newspaper publishers are competing with a host of free dailies the do a better job of covering individual communities than they do. By associating yourself with a constellation of neighborhood and community bloggers, most online newspapers could serve their community better.

And why on Earth would any publisher want to host blogs? Why put up with the liability, support headaches, creeping editorial responsibility, and general managerial overhead? That’s so ten years ago! That’s why God gave us Tim Berners-Lee. Anybody can create a Web site. And the (minimal) hassle of setting up a blog filters out the folks who’d never maintain a site in the first place.

If newspapers are going to survive, they’re going to have to get local in a hurry. Why is the A section of most newspapers national and international news and the B section local news? That’s backwards. And local news is even more important on the Web. People are going to the local daily for local news. And they should be going there for other links to the community.

On the Web, focus matters. And newspapers should be focusing their site on local news. When I built Coastsider, I worked hard to link to lots of local sites. This was as much about necessity as strategic vision. But I also know that this is going to come back to me in reputation, audience, and revenue. Every newspaper in the US should be aware that this kind of online community building is already taking place in their home markets. They either can surf this wave or be swamped by it. There is no other option.

On the Web, more even than real life, your reputation is your fortune. It’s the source of your network and the your network is the source of your customer base. Branding on the Web isn’t about advertising. It’s about reputation. It is your karma. Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon have translated good karma into big money and there’s no reason why newspapers can’t do the same.

Be a good neighbor: Think locally. Act locally.

Until newspapers embrace trackback, they’re not really part of the Web.
Weblogs aren’t powerful because a handful of A-list bloggers are influencing their loyal dittoheads. Weblogs are powerful because they’re part of a web of their own where millions of individual bloggers are pointing to stories — amplifying, clarifying, or debunking them. The size and complexity of this web-within-the-Web is staggering.
The power of all these links is multiplied by the power of trackback, which links a story back to any story that links to it, as long as both stories are on sites that support the trackback protocol. Trackback is the most original and important innovation that blogs brought to the Web, and is the last one that newspapers are likely to adopt. When you read a story, you know who’s pointing to it and what they’re saying about it. Trackback creates the kind of context and metadata for each story that you can’t buy at any price.
Trackback also provides accountability that comments cannot. You can’t get a trackback link unless you have a site that supports trackback and you’re willing to disclose your identity (or at least one of them).
Trackback is so good and so well accepted that it’s a requirement for weblog software. It should be a required feature for content management in general. Trackback solves the problems of the one-way nature of Web links and is especially useful for news stories.
Trackback is powerful, and it can be merciless. When SixApart announced its licensing terms for Movable Type 3.0, its users condemned the license on their sites, and linked to the announcement. Hundreds of trackback links to these negative stories festooned the announcement and created a network of dialog and feedback. SixApart had the nerve (or the good sense) not to interfere with the process, and eventually things calmed down a little. They banked some karma by leaving those trackbacks in place — karma that will stand them in good stead as they turn Movable Type into a for-pay product.
If they’re going to succeed on the Web, Online newspaper publishers are going to have to let go of the paralyzing fear that somebody, somewhere is going to make a little money from pointing people to their content.

Weblogs have revolutionized web publishing. The act of blogging itself isn’t all that revolutionary. But blog software developers have put powerful weapons in the hands of ordinary citizens. The Pentagon calls this asymmetrical warfare.
One unnoticed aspect of the revolution is that anybody can have searchable archives on their site. As soon as a story is published, it has a permanent URL and it keeps that URL even after it is moved off the home page. Users can follow offsite links to the story, or search the archives to find it on the site. In other words, the site is the archive.
Newspapers make a false distinction between their site and their archive. After a couple of weeks, they remove stories not only from their home page, but from their Web site. The original URL is broken, and readers who followed a link to the story are invited to search the paper’s archives for it and pay money to get a look at it.
Newspapers don’t even understand what URL’s are for. Many of them actively oppose “deep linking” to stories, or tacitly support the link-to-my-homepage-or-don’t-link-to-my-site element by their silence. After all, who even thought we needed a term for “deep linking”? It should be called linking.
They don’t understand that links from interested outsiders add even more value to their news by creating dense and useful meta-information that they couldn’t buy even if they wanted to.
Bloggers add value to old news with commentary, context, community, links, inbound traffic, and Google cred. With online advertising (especially search-related advertising) growing explosively, the value of having stories permanently accessible on your site far outweighs the trivial incremental revenue that comes from selling your archives.

Every year, newspapers hold conferences about online news and they invite the people who run Slashdot, Kuro5hin, and other geeky community sites to speak to them. They listen raptly to tales of how to build community online. And then they go back to their home markets and continue to dump their news on the Web.

I know of no US newspaper that lets its users attach comments to news stories — something nearly every does. If you want to comment on a news story, you’re going to have to put a pointer to it somewhere (on your blog, on a community site, on a static page) and put your comments somewhere else. No one can reply. No one can provide their opinion. No one can provide their insight from direct experience of the story.

Nobody who reads the story on the original site will be able to find your comment, because newspapers don’t support trackback (more on that later). And people who read your comments won’t be able to read the original story after it is moved to archives, usually about two weeks.

Free content management software is so competitive that it’s hard to find a package that doesn’t offer a pretty good facility for adding comments to individual posts, and most are moving in the direction of (optional) user registration. What that means is that there are literally millions of web sites run by regular human beings that welcome comments from readers.

Newspapers demand registration and acceptance of advertising email as a condition for reading their news, but none use those registrations to create a community.

It’s hard to find a better example of how newspapers still treat the Web like a broadsheet.

Note: Jonathan Dube’s piece “101 ways to improve your news site” addresses some of the issues that I’ve raised in this series. But he doesn’t address trackback.

It looks like I have to add a category for full CMS’s with a sufficient layer of abstraction to build sites other than a blog, wiki, or Slashdot clone. The three that have been mentioned in comments are:

EZPublish is a PHP/MySQL CMS that looks like it does all the right things, and you can get it as an abstract framework, or preconfigured for more structured sites. However, the one (undisputed) review that I have been able to find says that EZPublish is crufty and slow.

Bricolage is aparently the open-source evolution of Salon’s CMS, using Perl and MySQL. Personally, I’m leery of Perl, which I don’t know, and PostgreSQL, which I don’t use and can’t pronounce. But it looks like a mature and exciting alternative[too-short eWeek review].

Typo3 is abstract and uses PHP and MySQL. However, I’m having a really hard time understanding it by reading the site, which is badly organized and poorly documented. The site itself says it takes weeks to learn how to use Typo3.

If you’re looking for a CMS with a greater level of abstraction, you’re going to need to spend more time on your decision. I’d probably install both Bricolage and Typo3 and get to know them both.

Perhaps newspapers will never understand the Web.

We’re approaching the ten-year anniversary of newspapers on the Web — Mercury Center (my site) and SFGate launched at the end of 1994. Our vision of the Web has changed a couple of times in the last decade, but newspapers vision of their online edition remain unchanged.

Right now, we’re in the middle of a bottom-up revolution in how the Web is created and how people use it. OK, all real revolutions are bottom-up. That’s how you know it’s in a revolution.

Right now, Technorati is indexing 2.5 million blogs. Most of those are inactive, and most of the rest suck. But there is a huge, unmanageable number of sites remaining that are changing the way that people use the web. And the tools they use to create their sites and reach their audiences are steadily improving.

The title of this piece is deliberately provocative. I don’t expect newspapers to mimic blogs. But I don’t understand why they haven’t learned some broader lessons about how our use of the Web has changed in the ten years since we first went online.

Newspapers are treating RSS as a threat to their core business. They are desperately afraid of “aggregators” grabbing their headlines and treating them as wire services.

Why are they afraid of aggregators? I understand the rationale, but it doesn’t really make any sense. They want you to visit their home page, which they view as the gateway to the rest of their site, every day, whether they have any news for you or not.

Publishers don’t understand that the home page is no longer the gateway to their site. Every well-designed page has enough navigation and headlines to draw you into the site.

Publishers don’t trust their newsrooms to deliver headlines that will bring you to their site because you have to read the story.

Publishers are anxious because they can no longer get you to pay to have them deliver a package on your doorstep that you feel compelled to read because you paid for it and because you’d feel guilty to toss it out unread.

Publishers want you to read their sites because it’s a habit and not because they’re producing must-read journalism.

I spend too much time thinking about cheap content management. Between new sites and new licenses for software I’m already using, I’ve got a couple of reasons. But I think I may just be compulsively fascinated with the idea that my ideal CMS is just around the corner…and that it’s free.
My criteria are simple. A CMS needs to be able to create sites more complex than a simple blog. It needs to be easy to install and use. The software must be mature and apparently bug-free in daily operation. It should have a large community of users and developers. And it should cost less than $200 for a commercial license.
There seem to be four principal differentiating factors among these CMS’s:

• Platform: Perl, php, or Python/Zope. If this matters to you, you already know.
• Page generation: Static or dynamic. This is somewhat platform-related. For example any php site is going to be dynamic.
• License: Commercial, or Open Source. I’m not a zealot about this. I love the idea of Open Source, but I’m currently using commercial packages for my sites.
• Type of site: Weblog, news site, or Wiki. What you choose depends on what you’re publishing. How chronological do you want to be? Do you want a lot of modules packaged with your software? Do you want your site to look like Slashdot, or do you have an original design in mind?

So, here are what I think are the top ten free and cheap content management systems, in alphabetical order. If you’re thinking about creating a site, this would be a good list of candidates to start with. Examining each would also help you work out your ideas about the ideal CMS for your application. I’ve included a couple of basic blog packages that might not meet my personal criteria, but which I know people are using creatively.
Blogger is free and you don’t have to install any software. If you don’t know why you’re blogging yet, this might be a really good place to start. It’s owned by Google, which is a plus or minus, depending on your point of view.
Drupal is a full-blown site management system (php and MySQL) that has gotten a lot of recommendations since Movable Type changed their license. It’s open source and based on php and MySQL. It’s part of a geek triumvirate with Plone and Slash and I’m wondering if I really need three packages in this category. Other php-based CMS’s in this category are Nucleus and phpNuke.
Expression Engine is the newest CMS from Rick Ellis, who created pMachine, which I use to run Coastsider. It’s based on php and MySQL and seems very powerful and flexible. It will cost you money to run, either for personal or profession use, but it’s inexpensive and the license is flexible.
Movable Type is what I use to run MediaSavvy. I love MovableType. It’s based on Perl, but I love it anyway. It has a huge user and developer community. Movable Type pages are not dynamic and have to be rebuilt every time you make a change. This is reasonably fast, but can be a real pain if you get a lot of spam comments. They have the best templates in the industry and an inordinate market share among A-list bloggers.
Plone is based on Python and uses the Zope platform. It feels sort of like Drupal and Slash, and they’re all designed to help geeks reproduce Slashdot in whatever realm they’re geeky about.
Slash is a perl-based system for Slashdot-like sites. You need to have root access to the server it runs on, so it isn’t going to work for most users. A similar package with the same limitations is Scoop. I seriously considered using Scoop, but it was missing a lot of the things most modern CMS’s should offer, such as real templates and CSS support. I don’t know about Slash.
Some Wiki or other, there are dozens, I can’t tell them apart, and they all make my head hurt. But wikis are undeniably cool, ideal for some applications, becoming a lot more sophisticated, and are beginning to look like an overnight success ten years in the making.
WordPress is another contender who’s profile has been boosted by Movable Type’s licensing misstep. It’s php and MySQL, and its open-source. And it has the momentum of a killer asteroid. It’s biggest limitation is that it can only handle one blog, so you need multiple installations for complex sites. However, at least one thoughtful fellow chose it for his complex site.
That’s about ten, depending on how you count. I’d be interested in more nominations if they’re serious contenders for top ten and genuinely different from the ones I’ve listed here.