Tag: design

Places, Everyone! (Daily Filter)

I’m just going to skip right over yesterday’s tweets, live blogs, streaming videos and Flickr channels of Facebook’s location feature. I opened the filter a bit wider to let in a wider variety of sources, but Mashable and PBS/Knight/IdeaLab/MediaShift still go the most headlines through the filter.

And speaking of filters …

Google Releases Universal Search for Gmail, Docs and Sites I won’t be happy until it can find my keys and documentation of my that December 2003 expense report that accounting still hasn’t pushed through.

The future of UI Is VUI the new GUI?

Verizon Plans to Bring Live TV Streaming to the iPad The future of news is all about getting the right information to the right people at the right time.

FINDING THE MEDIATED CITY Durn, there’s a lot of words in this post. But whatever a mediated city is, I think journalists need to be at the center of creating it.

Auto-Tweeting Your Way to Spamsville Yup. Twitter’s about conversation. Not something you automate.

Broadcast Viewer Average Age: 51 Is it the device or the content that young folks don’t like?

The Web is not dead, but many wish it so
 Too many words for me to sound them all out, but Steve Yelvington looks like he might have smart thoughts about the inflammatory Wired article.

It’s still about the journalism, not the CMS I will be so glad when people feel like they no longer have to build their own CMS. Can’t everyone just use Drupal, the most awesomest CMS that is way better than anything else and is used by all the cool kids? The partisanship just has to stop.

The Web Design Community Offers Advice To Beginners Quickly saw a line that I might turn into a t-shirt for class. “Google before you ask.”

Statelight: Transparency in a Box, Pt. 2 I’m generally skeptical of anything in a box. They are usually operated with a turnkey and are bought at a one-stop-shop. But Statline’s good people. And the Good Lord knows we need more transparency at the state level.

Gannett Goes Hyperlocal With HighSchoolSports.net Wanna oust your local incumbent news organization? Publish a database of local crime, gossip about the schools and the scores and video from high school sports.

A fresh look at reporting skills Looks like Mindy McAdams has a good conversation going over at her blog. Need to stop in and check it out.

And finally a handful of posts that always draw my attention — ones that start with a number or an interrogative:

5 Useful Facebook Trend and Search Services

5 Questions with John Byrne of BusinessWeek, Fast Company, and Now, C-Change Media

10 Ways to Make Video a More Interactive Experience

NPR Listening By The Numbers—And The Platform

How Training Citizen Journalists Made a Difference

How Metadata Can Eliminate the Need for Pay Walls

I Filter, You Summarize?

Clay Shirky said we don’t suffer from information overload, but filter failure. That sounds right to me. Despite by efforts to use social and technical filters to focus my daily doses of e-mail newsletters, RSS feeds and tweets, I still find myself swamped with more words than I can read in the hour I’ve given myself to “read-in” each day. I am much more efficient at pulling things that might be interesting than carefully reading text for anything that’s actually new and noteworthy.

So here’s a new deal I’m going to start trying. I find the headlines and I ask you to filter back to me the new facts, missing info and impact of the stories. If you read one of the stories that pass my filter, will kindly post one comment if you find anything interesting in the articles themselves?

Here’s what passed through my filter today:
Continue reading “I Filter, You Summarize?”

Why Do We Need a CMS?

A bit of career advice for anyone in an online news organization: Never get roped in to leading the creation of your site’s new content management system. Yes, you may realize that the business rules that underly the CMS will determine who has the power to make decisions in your newsroom, but CMS projects are like storming the beach at Normandy — even if it’s successful, many involved in the operation will not survive.

With that optimistic image fresh in your mind, let’s look at what CMSs do and why your news organization needs one.

Continue reading “Why Do We Need a CMS?”

Newspaper Design and iTunes Cover Flow

One of the complaints that news Web site designers often hear from readers who prefer print is that it is tough to tell when you’re “done” reading a news Web site. In print, physical cues let readers know when they’re done skimming through everything that the editors thought was important to print that day. But online, a labyrinth of links leaves some readers disoriented and anxious about when it’s OK to stop reading.

Enter FluidTunes..

Continue reading “Newspaper Design and iTunes Cover Flow”

Research Question: Teaser Heads Online

Although I don’t hear this as often as I once did, the claim that online heads shouldn’t give away the whole story is one that pops up now and again in my conversations with editors. The editors — addled by increasing pressure to increase revenue by increasing ad inventory by increasing page views — surmise (rightly) that some readers come to their homepages simply for a quick nibble of news headlines, and that online news editors should, therefore, write teaser heads that don’t give away the milk.

On one hand, maybe they’re right. After all, teasers have been a feature of broadcast news for years.

On the other hand, this mentality flies in the face of just giving the customer what he or she wants. And, as we all know, the customer is always right.

So, how much of a tease will the online audience tolerate? Are younger readers, who are more likely to quickly click links in search of the information they want, more likely than older readers, who often carefully assess their choices before clicking on a link, more tolerant of teaser heads? Does the perceived urgency or relevancy of a headline cause readers to be more or less likely to click on teaser heads? Is there some measurement of vagueness that would allow us to find the right balance between serving our reader customers and serving our advertising customers?