Category: Analysis

Less then 10% of this page from the San Jose Mercury News contains news. (click for a full-size view: I lightened the non-news elements for greater visibiliity). The remainder is advertising, logos, navigation, house ads, and unchanging content (e.g. the stock chart).
I was pretty tough on Jakob Nielsen’s awful pie chart showing how much space each page element occupies. But he’s right to raise this issue. Jay Small raises this issue in his newsletter, taking on all the mandatory elements that bubble up from various parts of the publishing enterprise. Meanwhile, Nathan Ashby-Kuhlman says you must be able to deliver your content in multiple layouts, and that this should be a necessary feature of any decent content management system if you’re going to communicate what’s new about the news.

Ross Rader is right. Our current tools for producing content are inadequate for creating proper quotes, apostrophes, and other punctuation. This stuff should not require my attention to be correctly.

I have already confessed I’m using stupid (non-curly) quotes on MediaSavvy. I looked at SmartyPants and thought it was cool, until I contemplated installing a Moveable Type plug-in and modifying all my templates. Besides, I don’t believe the tags are the place this stuff should be fixed. I want my tools (this month it’s BBEdit, NetNewswire, and Moveable Type) to deal with this stuff natively. We’re not there yet.

I also agree that, in the larger scheme of things, this aesthetic consideration is a pretty small gripe. What’s amazing is how good (and cheap) these tools are.

The normally indispensible Declan McCullagh is just plain wrong when equates the move to require the labeling rights-impaired media and electronics wiith the move to require copy impairment be built into media and electronics.

To justify his claim that it’s always wrong to involve the government in a crusade for rights, he trots out experts from the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. Apparently the American Enterprise Institute was busy this morning.

I don’t know of labeling is a good idea or not (it seems like a step in the right direction), but Declan’s argument is unconvincing. The beauty of requiring labeling of copy-impaired products is that it imposes no obligation other than telling the truth and give consumers the opportunity to exercise their own judgment about whether to buy them. That sounds like a market-oriented solution to me.

Daring Fireball makes the case (if one needed to be made) for gracing the Web with real typography and the use of such non-ASCII characters as curly quotes and em dashes.

Proper typographic punctuation is 400-year-old news. That it’s considered exotic, or even non-standard, on today’s web is embarrassing. The solution isn’t for everyone to limit themselves to the same character set used on 1970’s-era VT-100 terminals. The solution is for software developers to write smarter software. Every day more web sites are starting to use smart punctuation, making sites that don’t — and the software behind them — look bad.

I haven’t been able to meet my typographic ideal yet with MediaSavvy, but it’s a medium-term goal for this site, once I get the content and focus where it needs to be. But, after reading The Elements of Typographic Style (an amazing book), I’m ready to polish this site’s design.

The 400 years of typographic tradition have (unconsciously) conditioned our readers to conventions that we flout at our peril.

One of the greatest dangers of consolidation and corporate control of the Net is that it creates a choke-point for government control.

Pennsylvania is using it to keep Internet users from accessing a class of forbidden sites. In this case it’s kiddie porn. Kiddie porn and terrorism are the stalking-horses for control of our lives and liberty.

The Homeland Security Act apparently has a provision that illegalizes model rocket engines. The choke-point? UPS and other carriers are refusing to handle them.

Speaking of choke-points, I want to gag every time I hear the phrase “enemies of liberty“. Search for it on Google News and see what you get. I got quotes from George W. Bush, John Ashcroft, and Oliver North — enemies of liberty indeed.

Reviewing software, especially enterprise software, intelligently is virtually impossible unless you’ve had a chance to use the software, possibly for months, in a reasonably realistic environment.

A friend of mine, a really sharp engineer, used to write a software column for a highly respected (non-IT) trade magazine. He got tons of marketing-speak from vendors. But he didn’t have the resources to determine whether any of the stuff actually did what it was supposed to do as well as it was supposed to do it. The main reason the column existed was so that ad sales people could call on software vendors and tell them, “Yes, we write about software.”

The truth is that unless you have frank information from real users, it’s nearly impossible to understand how a particular package will work in your environment. Even then, it’s a crapshoot. Especially when you’re talking about something as complex, raw, and organizationally dependent as content management software.

One reason Walt Mossberg seems so brilliant is that he actually uses the stuff he writes about and tells the truth without worrying about his or his employer’s relationship with the vendor.

“There’s nothing left but journalism,” concludes Tim Porter’s excellent rant about the future of the newspaper business.

When classified advertisers move to cheaper, better performing media; when readers stop reading the lame lifestyle filler; and when any idiot can get AP news free from the web–what is the daily newspaper for?

Tim suggests the answer to this question might be “journalism”.

[Egregious Blogroll alert: I found this story in my referrer logs]

It’s not enough to require spammers to disclose their identities. Spammers, legitmate direct emailers, direct mailers, and telemarketers must be required to disclose where they got your name and how to get your name off the original list.
As a former direct marketer who still believes in the medium, I am convinced it’s time for some common sense reform of the industry. There are four things that any direct marketer should be compelled to reveal to you.

• Seller: In many cases, marketers will have gotten your name from multiple sources and removed duplicate references. This means that they must tell you every list that your name appeared on.
• Select: You have a right ot know what the list seller is saying about you. Direct marketers often buy a subset of a list: e.g. recent buyers, people who spent more than $100 in the last year, people who bought certain types of products, or people who are in credit trouble.
• Source: You have a right to know how your name was acquired. Marketers must tell you the specific list you opted in to, whether your address was spidered off a web page, whether your on a list of buyers of a specific product, or if they got your name from public records.
• Removal information: You should be given the opportunity to remove your name from the original list at the point of contact. The original list compiler should be help accountable at the time the marketing takes place and should not be able to hide behind the marketer.

How would this work in practice?
Direct email: Every message should include a footer that discloses the seller, selection, source, and removal information.
Telemarketing: If you get a call from a telemarketer, at any time during the call you may ask, “Where did you get my name?” The caller will be required to give you seller, source, select, and removal information.
Direct mail: The address label must contain a source code (it probably already contains one that only the marketer can read). The direct mail piece must tell you a web site and a telephone number where you user that source code to get seller, source, select, and removal information.
It’s time for direct marketers to tell the truth about what they’re doing and tell you how to opt out.

The consensus of the newspaper executives is that “A newspaper has to be more than a newspaper to survive“, according to Peter M. Zollman’s report on the Newspaper Association of America’s Readership Conference and the Future of Newspapers Conference.
The next ten years will be a time of crisis for the newspaper industry, and delivering news to PDA’s–or Web browsers for that matter– isn’t going to save them if they don’t fix the core product.
When I was in the newspaper business, a lot of energy was expended and money wasted trying to come up revenue from “database marketing”. It turns out that newspapers are good at one thing–putting ink on paper and putting the paper on your doorstep.
If newspapers are going to survive, they’re going to have to be better newspapers. They’re going to have to meet the challenge of new media not by by “convergence, but by divergence. They need to put as much daylight between themselves and new media as possible if they’re going to meet the changing needs of their readers.

I love this mini-thread against heirarchical file systems and in favor of something more intuitive. It has implications for the way all sites are organized.
People don’t think heirarchically. For every anal-retentive who thinks in outlines and organizes his life and files that way, there are tens of thousands of average users, some of them quite sophisticated, who have all their files in big piles on their virtual desktop.
I spent a lot of time on my recent vacation trying to organize thousands of digital photos and I’m more confused than ever about where things are stored.
The current system was designed by programmers and engineers for people who think like they do.
Think about the way that Amazon.com works. Any reasonable user begins every session with a search, not by clicking on a hierarchical menu. What does this tell us about the way that content sites should be organized?