July 21, 2004, 2:41 AM ET
Extension questions
My friend Brian Dennis thinks my All Music Firefox extension might cause trouble and that "[l]awyers are getting lathered up somewhere". And Sylvie Noël is asking whether I'll be "safe from [legal] pursuit."
What?
For the record, my intent wasn't to offend or anger -- it was to help people use allmusic.com better. And to offer a proof-of-concept that a browser extension can add functionality to specific sites.
But anyway, Brian's and Sylvie's comments bring up some interesting questions.
What legal argument would AMG have against the extension? Copyright? Something to do with intellectual property? I dunno.
If it is indeed somehow unlawful, wouldn't that make the AMG-link-fixer bookmarklet I made a few weeks ago unlawful, too? It also alters page content. As do Jesse Ruderman's site-specific bookmarklets.
But that starts getting really hairy. Illegal bookmarklets? What? That's ludicrous.
Of course, the bookmarklet requires a user to click it each time the page loads. Whereas the extension removes that step. Is that the line? Automation?
This is some really interesting stuff to think about.
I see the All Music Guide extension as a sort of Web proxy. Kind of like those Web proxies that filter content to your liking -- like the ones that fix HTML and remove <blink> tags and stuff. The extension adds functionality to the site and, if anything, encourages people to spend more time there.
I can't see anything questionable in that.
July 19, 2004, 10:10 PM ET
Site-specific browser extension: All Music Guide
Lots of people are talking about All Music Guide's for-the-worse redesign. Here's an initial attempt at fixing it -- routing around the damage, so to speak.
I've written an extension for Mozilla Firefox that, when installed, alters the display and functionality of allmusic.com. Specifically, it does the following:
- It cleans up the horrible JavaScript-only links sitewide, thus enabling 21st-century browsing techniques such as tabbed browsing and opening links in new windows.
- It hides the annoying Flash spinner thing atop each page.
- It changes the functionality of the "Read more..." links on band and album detail pages. On the old AMG, band and album pages contained full reviews. Now, they feature only the first few sentences, with a link to "Read more..." on a separate page. The extension changes the functionality of that "Read more..." link so that, instead of taking you to a new page, clicking the link will dynamically load the full band/album review and insert it inline.
(If you have any ideas about what else the extension could do, please post a comment here or contact me. One idea I've had since I wrote it yesterday is to expand the length of the "Song title" table cell on album pages.)
To install the extension, just click the following link while using Mozilla Firefox 0.9+. It might work in 0.8, but I haven't tested it.
Then, restart your browser, and you're all set. Pretty easy, eh? You can uninstall it later in Firefox's handy extension manager.
A few tiny bugs exist -- namely that the extension makes the allmusic.com home-page link colors a bit funky -- but it's intended as a proof-of-concept more than anything else. To my knowledge, using browser extensions to "fix" Web sites, or add extra functionality, is unexplored territory.
There's a huge potential here. Site-specific Firefox extensions are an elegant, one-click-install solution to the problem of, well, lousy Web interfaces -- a problem Web users have had to shut up and deal with for as long as the Web has been around.
Let's do more of these things.
UPDATE, Oct. 15 -- I've updated the extension to work with Firefox Version 1.0 Preview Release. Thanks to everybody for the continued comments.
July 16, 2004, 2:44 AM ET
Required-user-registration debate continues
The folks on Poynter's online-news listserv once again are debating the merits (and, more importantly, demerits) of required user registration on news sites -- a topic I'm particularly passionate about. Here's a light rewrite of something I contributed to the list Thursday, in response to a defendant of user registration who wrote: "[T]here will always be an audience segment that opposes giving information about itself to read content on the Web":
It's not just the privacy issues. It's also the lack of value. Registration accounts are complete throwaways -- as very obviously evidenced by BugMeNot. Everyone I've talked to (techies and non-techies alike) sees this type of registration as an extremely annoying barrier with no redeeming value. There's no personal tie to a typical news-site registration account, no incentive to give accurate information or even care about who has access to your account.
Contrast this with community sites such as Slashdot, on which things like reputation and personalized features give people a heckuva lot of incentive to keep their account information private. Use registration where it makes sense, where the alternative (registration-lacking) product would be inferior -- and very obviously inferior, in readers' eyes.
(No, saying "Registered users get more highly-targeted ads!" isn't enough. Neither is saying "The benefit of registration is that you get the content." That's nothing short of arrogant -- and readers can and will get their regurgitated AP stories elsewhere.)
Slashdot is actually a decent example of how a news site registration system should work: Anyone can read it for free, but readers register to post comments. (Yes, anonymous comments are allowed, but they're discouraged by the brilliant social engineering of the "Anonymous Coward" label.) And, since the site has been this way for years, the community is mature enough that people actively want to register, because incentives, such as notoriety, karma, etc., are attractive.
