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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.

Mixed feelings about Kindle, bookstores’ inevitable demise

I have to be the only guy alive who finds holding an Amazon Kindle for the first time a little emotional.

I’ve always been a voracious reader, sometimes going through several novels at once. I love to kill time at a bookstore, especially ones with tons of used books. There’s nothing like going on a treasure hunt through some attic full of dusty old paperbacks.

I blame my mom. She read to me religiously when I was little. Together, we went through quite a few books during my tender years.

The Kindle is Amazon’s electronic tablet for reading books. I missed that bandwagon by about a year. In fact, the Kindle I held wasn’t even mine; it was a colleague’s. Holding that liquid-crystal-powered reader for the first time was a mixed experience for me because I am fascinated with the promise it holds, but morn what toll it will take.

I love books and exploring book stores.

Yes, good ole, tree-derived, Gutenberg-inspired, pulpy-white-page-filled, books. I almost feel curmudgeonly about it.

But I’m not a curmudgeon. I just have don’t know what to think about the coming digital conversion. Whereas newspapers going from print to digital doesn’t bother me at all, the venerable book’s changeover makes me a little sad. My inner-gadget-geekness stands in conflict with my inner-printed-book-lovingness.

I like the escape. So much of my day is spent in front of something electronic. Although I wouldn’t call a stack of dead tree-derived pages organic, leafing through a book does seem a little more relaxed and natural. Here’s some irony: I prefer teaching myself about Web design through printed books.

As this recession wrecks havoc on many businesses, bookstores are equally being punished. Borders Books and Music is particularly vulnerable. The mega book seller is sitting on a mountain of debt and declining sales. (Barnes & Noble appears to be in better shape.) Even its late return to selling books online doesn’t seem to be helping. After seven years of using Amazon as its online bookshelf, Borders relaunched its own .com last year. Much like newspapers, Borders watched the Web revolution fly by and reacted too late.

I feel some attachment to Borders — it was the first really large book store outside of a library that I had ever been in. My 10-year-old mind nearly exploded the first time I stepped into one.

I’ve used electronic readers before. What makes Kindle different, though, is its ease of use and backing from Amazon. Some hail it as the printed book’s version of an iPod. I found it easy to read, fairly resistant to glare, but lacking a back light. Graphically, again, the text is crisp but all pictures and text are just in black and white. The screen isn’t green, but it did remind of  Nintendo’s original Game Boy. You can access the Kindle bookstore without a wireless connection via Sprint’s mobile network. Authors can even self-publish their works in the online store.

I’ll tell you one thing — my sore back, which lugged at least 18 pounds of books in college, would have loved one of these babies. Who needs sentimentality when you’re walking around campus like a pack mule?

TechDirt asks: Is the physical bookstore a thing of the past? Revolution, in whatever form it takes, won’t happen overnight. Still, I fear my beloved brick-and-mortar booksellers and printed books are writing their last chapters.

Struggling industries will try anything

What do you do when you want to save your business from failure? Seek taxes, sue your customers or find some government protection, apparently.

Although the auto and financial industries’ troubles are the obvious, in-the-news examples, many other traditional businesses have been struggling for years too. Think movie, music and newspaper companies.

The Internet being the great disruptive force it is has thrown many firms into a tailspin trying to protect their old business models from its influence. Here are some recent examples.

• Record companies in Canada receive 29 cents — recently up from 21 cents — for every blank CD sold in the country. The Canadian copyright board levies this charge in an attempt to “compensate” artists record companies that are suffering loses due to music piracy. IPods, flash drives and even DVDs are not taxed.
• This guy — who is a professor, god help us — suggests newspapers should seek an antitrust exemption so they can collude and start charging for online subscriptions.
  

  Now, here’s my idea: The newspaper industry should ask the Justice Department for an antitrust exemption that would allow publishers to collaborate on a decision to begin charging for their Web sites. No paper would have to charge, and each paper could determine its own price. But if most papers in a region – San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, for example – began charging for Web access at more or less the same time, many readers would likely subscribe.

• Speaking of papers, this writer and others think the government should revive the Depression-era Federal Writers’ Project to put unemployed journalists to work.
• Ever wonder why sharing music is such a pain in the butt? Blame DRM, which many record, movie and software providers use to block you from sharing their works. What happens when companies put particularly intrusive DRMs in their products? Revolution.

  The Dark Knight, which grossed nearly a billion dollars worldwide, was 2008′s most-pirated movie. (Could have all the piracy actually encouraged people to pay and see the blockbuster movie?) Spore, a popular computer title, and despite its DRM, was ’08′s most-pirated computer game. Have they not learned?

  Sony widely received criticism for putting DRM malware in its CDs in 2005. The protection software actually opened users’ computers to viral attacks. Not exactly a ringing endorsement for the technology.

  Say what you will about piracy/sharing’s legality, but the Web makes “owning” intellectual property in the 21st century very difficult.

• The Recording Industry of America rushed to shutdown two last.fm-like music-sharing Web sites because the group couldn’t collect royalties. Never mind that these sites encourage more music consumption and exploration.
• The much-hated RIAA has shifted its failing strategy of suing its customers to suing Internet Service Providers. One record company exec has even suggested taxing universities for all the music their students steal.

Even Web companies struggle making money off the Internet. The first dot-com crash showed that your .com needs a business plan beyond piles of venture capital money and unrealistic initial public offerings. (Goodness, Netscape had revenues of just $16 million when it went public and was valued at more than $2 billion(!!).) I believe the later days of Web 2.0 are showing that you can’t count on just advertising to sustain your online business.

Still, some companies successfully mix free and charge services. Basecamp creator 37signals is an oft-cited example.

Bottom line: Businesses are struggling to survive in a world of “free” online. Competition is fierce and creating a scarcity online is difficult. With the cheap cost of entry, anyone can undercut you by being a disruptor. Taxes, suing your customers and government interference are hardly business plans, though.

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 »