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Hear my commandment: Know thy medium

If there were commandments in online advertising and marketing, atop that list should be: Know thy medium.

For the past several weeks, Ohio.com, the online home of the Akron Beacon Journal, has positioned a button ad on the right side of its home page where Dr. James George, DDS promotes his dental services. (By the way, doesn’t this guy look like James Lipton?)

Ohio.com doesn’t use its medium, the Internet, in the right way for two reasons:

1. The ad is an annoying Flash animation that blocks you from clicking on any news story in the path of a blimp that zips across the page.
2. If the blimp entices you to click on George’s button, an external application fires up to read a linked pdf.

Usability expert Jakob Nielson notes in his Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design that

Users hate coming across a PDF file while browsing, because it breaks their flow. Even simple things like printing or saving documents are difficult because standard browser commands don’t work. Layouts are often optimized for a sheet of paper, which rarely matches the size of the user’s browser window. Bye-bye smooth scrolling. Hello tiny fonts.

Worst of all, PDF is an undifferentiated blob of content that’s hard to navigate.

PDF is great for printing and for distributing manuals and other big documents that need to be printed. Reserve it for this purpose and convert any information that needs to be browsed or read on the screen into real web pages.

Worse yet, on slower computers or Web connections, unexpected pdfs have the tendency to crash browsers and computers. Even if that doesn’t happen, pdfs really slow down the users’ experience as their computers manage an unexpected download. On faster machines, less savvy users are disorientated, not recognizing that they are actually in an external application. I’ve witnessed this many, many times.  All sorts of other usability issues pop up with pdfs as Nielson notes in another post.

Ok, so we’ve established that pdfs generally are not user-friendly. What should have Ohio.com done?

1. If there must be an annoying flying blimp, which I’m sure the client loved, render it in javascript or some less obtrusive form of Flash so users can navigate to surrounding stories without interference. You still grab the readers’ attention but don’t meddle with their ability to use your product. (Journalists should also contemplate the ethical dilemma the blimp creates by obtruding their content.)
2. Get off their lazy butts and create a landing page for Dr. George. What an awesome upsale! Or at least do it like George does on his Web site. Although surrounded by an ugly wrapper, George’s coupon page allows you to print gifs of his money savers by opening them in a pop-up window. (If I wanted to get picky, I would point out that pop-up blockers are standard with many modern browsers and are on by default. By making the coupons a pop-up, many users will not see them — at least not easily.)
3. At minimum warn users that an external application will open a pdf of the coupons.

Ohio.com’s ad salespeople are really doing Dr. George a disservice by linking to a usability-unfriendly pdf of his printed ad and deploying story-click-blocking animations. They are not alone. Many newspapers republish pdfs of their print ads online as a “service” to readers — but more accurately as a disservice to their advertisers. The online salesforce would do better to take advantage of the Web’s abilities rather than lazily posting a pdf of the newspaper ad.

News Mixer blends in smart story commenting

A group from Medill’s journalism school has created an open-source tool called News Mixer that integrates Facebook IDs into its interface.

Medill’s tool takes news-story commenting out of the ghetto. You know you’ve seen it — those awful, racist, and oftentimes off-topic comments made under some news articles. Newspaper Webmasters have been notoriously awful at moderating their communities. Ohio.com, the online home of the Akron Beacon Journal, once used Topix.net for its commenting. Not only were the BJ people outsourcing their comments, they were sending them to Topix, the ghetto of commenting ghettos. Much to the publication’s credit, the Beacon moved its comments back on site a few months ago.

News Mixer features three ways to converse:

1. Q&A – Leave questions for reporters or other readers
2. Quips – Short, less than 140-word thoughts
3. Letters to the editor – Longer than quips and the software allows editors to highlight the best

The icing on the cake, though, is the Facebook ID integration. This forces users to use their real identities — although the users could fake a profile on Facebook, just like anywhere else, but I don’t see this as likely as on-the-spot Web site registration. The social-networking integration isn’t completely new. A couple months ago, CNBC inked a deal with LinkedIn to use that social network’s profiles on its site.

Facebook Connect Live lists what sites are using its new platform. With Facebook Connect, users can utilize their Facebook ID’s to log into other sites to leave comments and extend their identity beyond the walls of Facebook. This is similar to OpenSocial and OpenID, which I’ve written about before.

Perhaps Newsmixer will help end the debate over the value of story commenting. Yes, there is value! Blogs and other non-newspaper sites have proven this for the past few years. The difference, though, as Techdirt notes (emphasis mine):

The argument [against commenting on newspaper sites] is, basically, that a lot of the comments are really dumb, and don’t add very much. That may be true, but in many cases, that’s because the newspaper doesn’t give anyone incentive to add smart comments. There’s no indication that anyone at most newspapers read the comments. The authors of the articles rarely, if ever, respond to people in the comments. There’s little to no engagement or discussion. So, instead, the comments just become a way for readers to vent. Just tossing up comments and thinking you’ve created a community is a mistake — but that doesn’t mean newspapers shouldn’t enable comments. It just means they should do so in a more intelligent manner.

I onced suggested — and received a fantastic guffaw from an older journalist — that we should treat stories online more and more like blogs. Does this mean dropping objectivity and providing more analysis than just-the-facts-m’am? I don’t know, but I do think it means writing stories and directly engaging the people who comment below them. Aside this News Mixer system, reporters should be regularly responding to and commenting below their stories. Arguably, these same journalists, with some help, should be managing the online communities of their beats.

(News Mixer stuff via Patrick Beeson)

The Gazette slowly dies

A couple days ago, my tech-savvy grandparents e-mailed me a link to a story in the Gazette, my hometown’s newspaper and location of my summer 2003 internship.

While the Gazette has long been negligent in its online efforts, the reporting and photography at the paper has always been top-notch, garnering many awards for the 15,000-some circulation publication. Within the past two years, the Web site finally received a nice face lift, which was subsequently gutted for an awful replacement earlier this year. At least they enabled comments.

As circulations plummet, ad dollars evaporate and American newspapers head toward bankruptcy, what has the brilliant leadership (read: publisher George Hudnutt) decided to do for the Gazette? Start charging for content online.

George, where have you been for the past 18 years? Continue reading »

Mygazines: Where 21st century piracy meets 19th century publishing medium

With a new Web site called Mygazines, you can scan in your favorite periodical and share it with the world. That’s a lot of work for something that is terrible to read on a computer screen.

Are publishers grateful for these extra eyes on their content and advertising? I guess not.

No, I don’t get the “convenience” of being able to read a print publication on my computer screen, especially when many Web technologies exist that allow you to do this more easily. MP3s, music, movies and software certainly lend themselves to piracy; I don’t think magazines do. I can’t think of a publication that I would like to spend time scanning. Plus, many of these magazines are already online for free! Continue reading »

Support this crowdfunding project

• Spot.us seeks donations for election project — Spot.us is seeking a freelance journalist to do some fact checking for it during the upcoming election season. But being that it’s a community-funded venture, they need your help. People in San Francisco: toss a few dollars their way to help this community journalism project get off the ground. It could be our/your/journalism’s future.
• Yahoo developer divines Web 3.0 future — He sees it as desktop apps, an extension of the current AJAX experience. Tim Berners-Lee sees it as the semantic Web. No doubt both will be strong components of the continuing metamorphosis of the Web.
• Yahoo giving coupons to replace dead DRM tracks — As mentioned before, Yahoo’s DRM-based music service is dead. Originally the search company suggested music users burn all their tracks onto CDs and copy them to their computers. Now it’s offering free replacement downloads via Rhapsody.
• Cheap usability testing software — Usability software Silverback is only $50 and comes with a 30-day trial. It allows you to record your test subjects as they navigate about your site. Usability testing is a science upon itself and requires very specific techniques. Still may be worth using after reading up on the volumnious subject.