September 25, 2002, 12:46 PM ET
Wednesday's recommended links, and thoughts on Google News
A new Digital Web Magazine column, Fluid Thinking, has this outstanding advice for Web designers: "Think fluid. The WWW isn't a fixed medium. It's unpredictable. It will do unexpected things to your site, and the best you can do is go with the flow."
Editor and Publisher is the latest media outlet to cover Google News. I've been thinking about Google News a lot lately. Building on my ideas last week, here are a few other things I'd like to see:
- Separate design from presentation, and let users design the site themselves using a style sheet, as AllTheWeb already does.
- Syndicate headlines with RSS. Offer not only general categories, like Entertainment or Sports, but search-term-specific RSS feeds, as I offer on Holovaty.com. Put targeted ads into those RSS feeds -- I'd bet people would actually like them.
- Offer an e-mail service, like the New York Times' News Tracker alerts. For example, I would really appreciate an e-mail any time a news article included the word "beatles". Or send the e-mails out on the hour.
- Put together photo galleries. People love photo galleries. Clearly Google has the technology to grab news images; why not put 'em together?
- Offer an opinions section. I'd be interested in seeing what pundits from around the world were saying about certain things. And include bloggers in the mix.
