February 23, 2004, 3:04 PM ET
How not to solicit redesign comments
The folks at Newsday.com have redesigned -- and they're anxious to hear your feedback.
That is, if you're quick enough with the mouse. The "redesign reactions?" box atop the site's home page scrolls by faster than you can click it in Mozilla Firefox.
It uses the <marquee> tag, but here's an animated GIF interpretation (courtesy of Dan Cox), so this can be recorded for posterity.
February 13, 2004, 12:38 AM ET
Wire-story disclaimer at cbs2.com
Los Angeles' cbs2.com does something interesting with wire content. It displays this disclaimer above AP stories (example):
In the interest of speed and timeliness, this story is fed directly from the Associated Press newswire and may contain spelling or grammatical errors.
Though it's unintentionally harsh toward the AP (as pointed out by Lost Remote), the notice is not a bad idea.
If you're going to give your site's readers the same regurgitated wire stories they can find at any Web site that regurgitates AP copy, you might as well come clean about the regurgitation.
February 11, 2004, 1:36 AM ET
Topix.net service policy: Hypocrisy in action
First, I was intrigued by Topix.net, an automated site whose robots screen-scrape thousands of American news sites and categorize the content for easy browsing by topic. It is innovative and useful, and the folks who put it together, alumni of the Open Directory Project, really know their stuff.
But I happened upon the site's Terms of Service and was appalled by its hypocrisy and cheekiness. It left such a bad taste in my mouth that I can't bring myself to say anything else nice about the service.
Let's take a look at the "Use of the Service" section of that page.
You may only display the content of the Service for your own personal use (i.e., non-commercial use) and may not otherwise copy, reproduce, alter, modify, create derivative works, or publicly display any content.
Note: Topix.net copies, reproduces and publicly displays content from more than 3,000 other Web sites.
For example, you may not do any of the following: use the Service to sell a product or service; use the Service to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales;
Note: Topix.net displays advertising on almost every page of its site. One might say it uses other sites' content to increase traffic to its Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales.
take the results from the Service and reformat and display them, or mirror any portion of the results on your Web site; or use the Service as part of a "meta-search" offering.
Note: Topix.net takes headlines and paragraphs from news sites and reformats and displays them -- often verbatim. It might be seen as a "meta-search" offering.
You also agree that you will not use any robot, spider, other automated device, or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the Service.
Note: Topix.net's fundamental operation is predicated on using robots/spiders to monitor and copy content from outside sites.
From point three on the same page: "The results that appear from Topix.net's indices are indexed by Topix.net's automated machinery and computers".
From point seven on the same page: "Topix.net's indices consist of information that has been identified, indexed and compiled through an automated process with no advance review by human beings."
I admire the Topix.net proprietors for their gall. But their hypocrisy is undeniably crass.
February 11, 2004, 1:33 AM ET
A one-fingered salute from the Firefox folks
I figured I'd contribute to the Mozilla Firefox project and report a critical bug -- that the Download Manager image looks like it's flicking me off. (See screenshot.)
Turns out another person had reported the same bug and it had been marked as a WONTFIX. One might say the developer who quashed the suggestion raised his middle finger at us.
That irony is classic.
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February 4, 2004, 2:27 AM ET
Participatory journalism in an unlikely -- or likely? -- place
You know, there really is something to this participatory journalism thing.
I turned on the Super Bowl for a few minutes Sunday night. (Not because I wanted to watch the wretched thing. My wife had asked me to tape the subsequent show, so I wanted to see how much time was left.) Turns out it was halftime, and Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson were performing the type of music I normally go out of my way to avoid.
Well, we all know what happened during that performance. And I saw it -- live. Er, I thought I saw it. I wasn't sure. The camera cut away so quickly that I couldn't really tell what'd happened.
So I did what any self-respecting Internet-junkie would do: I flipped open my laptop and hit the Web.
CNN had nothing. MSNBC had nothing. Neither did the New York Times, Washington Post or Chicago Tribune. Google News didn't say anything about it, either. I checked a bunch of other big-media sites but couldn't find any coverage.
I began to think I'd just been delusional. Then I checked Fark.
Fark.com -- a deranged mix of quirky news-article links, hilarious Photoshop antics, incestuous user comments, and a healthy dose of porn -- had the story. In my estimation, it'd been less than 15 minutes since the halftime show ended -- and Farkers were already talking about it.
The thing is, despite Fark's classically low signal-to-noise ratio, it wasn't all prepubescent blather. I daresay some of it was participatory journalism in action.
Read the archived comment thread to see the story unfold. There were first-person accounts of watching the event. There was background information. There was analysis and piecing-together of the facts. And, most importantly, there was an effort to distribute any and all raw information about the incident, mostly in the form of high-resolution TV-screen-grabs and video.
It was clear that all of this was fueled by a desire to get to the bottom of the story -- a desire not unlike that of a professional reporter.
Could this have been a glimpse of the future? Could a much more traditional news story be covered in the same way, given the right mix of a dedicated audience and enabling technology?
Yes, much of this interest was on a prurient level, and most people probably wouldn't share the same excitement about, say, a school board meeting. But who's to say there isn't a core niche devoted to, and willing to contribute to, every feasible news story?
Yes, nudity is taboo in the United States, and media have community standards to uphold. But shouldn't mature adult readers have access to it when it's newsworthy, as long as it's opt-in?
Yes, probably not a single one of the Fark contributors was actually at the Super Bowl, and all of their facts were collected from "mainstream" sources such as the CBS television broadcast. So what? Even two days later, this is STILL coverage you can't find at any big-media site. And who's to say a photo-phone-toting Super Bowl attendee couldn't have contributed?
Yes, traditional media outlets couldn't have posted a lot of those photos and video because of licensing, syndication privileges and all that. Ahh, maybe this is a limitation of traditional media?
UPDATE: It's come full circle.
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