December 21, 2003, 1:57 AM ET
XFN: Something about personal relationships
XFN, unveiled by Tantek Çelik, Eric Meyer and Matthew Mullenweg earlier this week, aims to "put a human face on your linking."
Developed with personal weblogs in mind, XHTML Friends Network is a way of identifying human relationships within a Web page's code. When you link to a friend's Web site, throw in a rel="friend" to declare your relationship to the world. That'll allow you to target those links in your own code (perhaps to offset them in some way), and it'll provide all the necessary information for yet-to-be-written information-gathering robots to...well...do something.
What, exactly, can be done with this data is anybody's guess. Two ideas I've seen so far: "Trust networks" and dynamically rendered asterisks beside links to real-life friends' pages. The former is slightly pie-in-the-sky; the latter is...well...something.
Although I'm hard-pressed to think of an online-news application for this technology (21st-Century news media don't have personal relationships!), let alone any practical application, I've added XFN code to the blogroll on this site's home page. I'm a sucker for early markup adaption. And while I may have my doubts about the tangible effects XFN will have on the Web, it's clear to me that XFN is a good thing.
The significance of XFN is that it will get more people thinking about, and appreciating, metadata. The more people appreciate metadata, the less expensive it becomes to create. The less expensive metadata is to create, the more often metadata is used. And the more often metadata is used, the more applications will be invented to utilize it.
And, finally, that'll be something.
December 12, 2003, 6:06 PM ET
Job opportunity: Online producer in Florida
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December 11, 2003, 12:39 AM ET
An interesting navigation idea
I recently had the pleasure of meeting two visiting online journalists from Sweden's Sydsvenskan. While discussing the Swedish online media landscape, one of them, Andreas, introduced me to Aftonbladet, a popular newspaper site.
What's notable about Aftonbladet is its unusual navigation scheme: The site's home page content, a complete index of the day's news, is repeated nearly in full at the bottom of individual story pages. (See this example story page.) Hence, as Andreas demonstrated for me, reading the news is a matter of clicking the top headline, reading its story, scrolling down that article page, clicking the second headline, and so forth. There are a few exceptions -- some story pages display only the section index, not the home page -- but, for the most part, the Back button is rarely used.
At first, I thought this was an awfully inelegant and inefficient example of duplication, but navigating it seemed natural to Andreas; he seemed to enjoy it. Maybe it's not as bad of an idea as my instincts suspected.
December 5, 2003, 2:22 AM ET
Bad news art at CNN.com
I got a huge kick out of the Best of CNN photo gallery (via Metafilter), which presents more than 200 examples of news art used on CNN.com.
Boy, those things are bad. They're strange medleys of clip art, stock images, bona fide news photos and poorly done Photoshop effects, and it's troubling that CNN relies on them so heavily.
I suspect most of these images were produced on tight deadlines in order to add visual interest to the site's pages. But when images are so badly done they're embarassing, it's time to reconsider whether they're necessary. TV news' there-must-be-an-image-on-the-screen-at-all-times mentality doesn't translate to the Web.
December 1, 2003, 2:24 AM ET
Tagging quotes in a news story
During the recent Medill Storytelling Symposium at Northwestern University, somebody incidentally mentioned the tendency for readers to skim through news articles and stop only to read direct quotes. It's no surprise why: Quotes are often the most colorful parts of a story, and disillusioned readers might think direct quotes are the only pieces of a story not infused with a reporter's bias.
That got me thinking. If some readers read only the quotes in newspaper stories, why not make that easier on them?
Wouldn't it be cool if...
- ...Online news stories had an option to "highlight all quotes," which would, for example, subtly gray-out everything that wasn't a quotation? That'd guide the quote-skippers' eyes to the content they really wanted, while maintaining context.
- ...There were an "All recent quotes by Mayor Smith" page? Sounds valuable to readers and reporters alike. Heck, I'm sure Mayor Smith herself would find it useful.
- ...There were an "All quotes in today's newspaper" page? With links to full articles, of course, for context.
If news providers tagged and fielded their quotes somehow, all this would be possible. HTML already provides the <q> tag for marking-up quotations, but the problem is that someone has to insert the tags in the first place. That's no big deal if a single person is in charge of editing content -- Mark Pilgrim's Posts by Quotation archive succeeds because he puts much effort into marking-up blog entries -- but changing the workflow of a multi-person online-news production staff is significantly more difficult. And the extra time it'd take for a Web producer to tag all the quotes in a story manually just wouldn't be worth it.
So is this a pie-in-the-sky idea? Of course not! I think technology is the answer. It seems to me 80 percent of quotes in news articles are in exactly the same quote-citation-quote format:
"They've got a building down in New York City," said Arlo Guthrie. "It's called Whitehall Street, where you walk in, you get injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected."
Begin quote mark; text; end quote mark; "said"; source name; begin quote mark; text; end quote mark. Looks very parsable.
Of course, the other 20 percent of quotes aren't as nicely formatted. But I'm not so sure that automating the tagging of quotes in a news article is impossible. I think I might try it.
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