January 12, 2004, 11:40 PM ET
Persistent pop-ups? Not a good idea
An E-Media Tidbits post today suggested that news sites might benefit from the Orbitz.com technique of spawning pop-up windows when readers click away to other sites. "Use this window to go back to the article you were just reading," the pop-up might say.
Fundamentally, this idea isn't half bad. It's too easy, especially for patience-deprived surfers like me, to click an offsite link and forget one's position in the previous site. Sure, that's what the Back button and History are for, but those tools can get hairy -- particularly when surfing in a tabbed browser. I can see some good in a Web site that remembers what I did last.
But the pop-up implementation? Horrid. Maybe -- and that's a big maybe -- it's appropriate for critical, transaction-based applications, where it's vital that you leave your browser open to a particular site before you complete, e.g., a multi-page purchase. But do we really want this for news? With few exceptions, it essentially would mean that clicking any external link (your bookmarks, your e-mail client, in-page external links) would result in a rather intrusive popped-up message:
"Hey! You're leaving our site! But we'll stick around in this pop-up window just in case you ever decide to come back. You know. Just in case you forget our URL."
If news sites are going to start keeping track of the last article I read, they'd best do it on their servers. Not on my precious desktop space. Set a cookie, and use it to display relevant session-based data directly in the page layout -- as Amazon.com does. Don't pop up.
January 5, 2004, 2:16 AM ET
Give online news stories a relative importance rank
While reading a crime story on the Seattle Times' Web site earlier today, I wondered how important the Times' editors thought the story was. Not knowing the Seattle area, I wasn't sure how newsworthy parking-lot shootings are in Des Moines, Wash., so I wanted to find out.
Problem was, I'd stumbled upon the story via a section index page that appeared to be ordering stories by date and time alone. That didn't give me any clues as to how important the story was, relative to the rest of the day's news. And the story wasn't on the site's home page; either it had already been replaced by more recent content, or it had never made it there in the first place. I didn't know, and I couldn't find out.
That got me thinking. It'd be useful if news sites made stories' importance more obvious.
A well-refined news-judgment scale is one of the few things print newspapers still have going for them. When you pick up a newspaper, it's easy to figure out what was important when that dead wood went to press: Just flip the thing to page one. And, for the most part, the rest of the stories fall in order of priority. (With exceptions, of course, for pages deep within a section, where story placement becomes more dictated by ad space, story length, photo availability, etc.)
On a news Web site, though, there aren't many good ways for editors to communicate how important a story is. Stories sit alone, in templated obscurity, with no hint of how much more or less newsworthy they are than every other story that day, that week, or that month.
But it doesn't have to be that way. Why not assign metadata to each story that explains how important the story is? Such a system needn't be complex; producers could assign a simple, one through 10, "importance value" to each story. With that data, a site could dynamically alter a story's appearance -- using a different sized headline, for instance -- based on its importance. Or maybe it'd be more straightforward to include a small sidebar saying: "This was the third most important story on our Web site on Thursday. Click here to see stories that were more important."
This extra metadata lends itself to a few other cool possibilities: Dynamically generated "Most important stories of 2004 (so far)" pages, search results sorted by story importance, section pages ordered by story importance, breaking-news e-mails sent out automatically whenever a story has the highest importance...And the most-important story list could be cross-referenced with the most-e-mailed story list to create some sort of greatest-hits collection of editors' picks and readers' picks.
I'm certain existing content-management systems have "priority" functionality; this idea is nothing special. But why aren't news sites using it?
Related: Nathan Ashby-Kuhlman's Can your CMS do 150-point headlines?
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