asap: An Inspired Failure

The Associated Press’ asap, a trail-blazing Web product aimed at young people unfamiliar with the phenomenon of ink ruboff, will cease operations in October, the mother ship has announced. Refreshingly, it appears the suits came clean and just ’fessed up: asap wasn’t making enough money. 

Fair enough. AP’s biggest revenue source remains newspapers, and these days we all know how sentences that begin that way end. Nobody should blame the company for sticking a plug in a money drain.

But let’s hope the suits are also telling the truth when they say they’ll transplant some asap mojo to other AP services. This would be wise. Asap has some great features–and a frisky, creative young staff–worth saving.

Good asap

I think of asap, at its best, as a younger version of Slate, but without the smarter-than-you swagger. And without as many words. Like Slate, it’s full of stories you could easily live without. But you come away feeling somehow better, if not precisely smarter, for spending time with them. 

• Check out this multimedia feature on hats. Great use of video (nice background music), handsome simple graphics, targeted precisely at young people just beginning to think about grown-up matters like, well, wearing hats. These multimedia stories are what asap does (did?) best.
• The site often knew its target audience well. While not an inspired production, this essay by an AP intern on why she’s decided to attend Virginia Tech in the fall is perfect for the asap audience. [Note to producers: No links to multimedia elements of the VT coverage? Yeesh.]
•  Look at this brain-opening article on a military manual for soldiers posted in Iraq–from 1943. [Text is too long, though.]

Bad asap

• Embedding audio clips in articles, even when well-produced, provides a lousy user experience. The clips are often incoherent when used as a podcast, so their “best” use is as a media supplement to the on-screen story. I’ve said it before in this blog: If there is anyone who has clicked on an audio file (even music) and not gone on to some other task (either on the computer or around the office) while it plays in the background, I’ve yet to meet that person.
• Way too much stuff, especially recently, appears to be half-thought-out enhancements of regular AP copy, often presented under the heading “Reporting Back.” It’s as if someone on high said, “Original productions are too expensive, let’s find a way to media-up our AP stuff and put it on the site. Kids like multimedia. Don’t they?” [In fact, I'm sure that was said. If anyone out there knows who said it, please feel free to leave an anonymous comment here. For that matter, if the perp wants to confess here, that's even better.]
• Way too much material consists of longer versions of AP-ish stories. This is based on a theory so out of date it’s scary. Time was, people would say “space in the paper is limited, but we have all the space we want on the Web.” People said this before they realized that a user’s attention is the most precious resource on the Web, even more precious than it is in print. This calls for much shorter, tighter and designed-to-be-scanned text on the Web. Yes, you can add supplemental documents, links to supporting info and so on to enhance an article; indeed, that’s a Web-journalism best practice. But you can’t write long and loose just because there’s noone telling you to keep it to 14 inches and file by 2 p.m.
• Another example of multimedia abuse (not even a misdemeanor in most jurisdictions, but it should be): photo galleries apropos of nothing. This piece on the environmental consequences of biofuel production makes a fascinating point. It consists of a longish, loosely edited article with a 14-photo gallery. The gallery is beautiful; the music behind it elegaic. But in the end, it’s National Geo eye candy; it fails to create a narrative or even accomplish exposition. It does not advance the story, it merely indulges it visually.

It appears asap failed commercially because AP is not positioned to monetize it, and (I’d argue) editorial direction got diffuse. But deploying smart young people to explore the world from their perspective, using an emerging set of multimedia tools, is a great thing to try. Someone should glean the lessons and reach the next level.

Will it be AP?

 The answer to that question, as usual, lies with the suits.

Obesity Map: Just What the Web Doc Ordered

Let’s start the week with an item from the Web Done Right files: 

Take a look at CNN’s Fit Nation “Obesity in America” map. The feature illustrates, via a timeline slider and interactive national map, how much each state’s percentage of obese people increased between 1985 and 2004. It’s a great example of how a simple, often neglected 1.0 technique–Flash–can be effective when used properly.

There’s an even more effective rendering of the geography of obesity over at Revolution Health. Mouse over any state to see its obesity rate during any of the years covered, 1990 through 2006. [Interest revealed: I used to work at Revolution.]

The point: plain old-fashioned Web technology can be a powerful centerpiece even when surrounded by the usual 2.0fferings: UGC, vanity videos, blogs, etc. The temptation these days is to favor the faddish over the effective. Both sites show this isn’t necessary.

[Oddly, the CNN map shows the states with the highest obesity rates in red and those with lower rates in blue. The results is a map showing blue and red states. I wonder if Wolf Blitzer known about this.]

The 2.D’oh! Weekly Round-Up: Vol. I

As we head into the weekend, let’s take a quick look at the lowlights, high points and general mischief around 2.0ville during the past week.

Talk About viral: The Online Video Contagion Spreads

The Center for Media Research reports that 132 million Americans viewed online video in the month of May. Average time spent during the month was 158 minutes. I’m bad at math that goes beyond nine figures, but I think that’s a total of 350 million hours never to be retrieved. I think if that time had been spent teaching poor kids to read, we could have in one swoop made American kids more literate than their French counterparts, or maybe even the Germans, just like that. Ah, well. There’s always June.

Lost, the 2.0 Version

Today the New York Times has an excellent article about the development of UGC maps, where Wikipedia meets Flickr meets MySpace and GoogleMaps [I think that meeting place is here, but I'm not sure].  

Nobody Goes There Anymore, It’s Too Crowded

Wired has an excellent article on Second Life by Frank Rose, revealing how marketers have invested heavily in ad campaigns there, only to find the place virtually (har!) deserted. Too bad: We’ve been hoping to see a “Nigerian Bank Fund Transfer” pavilion in Second Life any day now. “Drop off your Social Security card to enter our free sweepstakes!” 

And Finally, Our Friday ‘Noted Without Comment’ Item

http://glimpseback.com/

New AOL: It’s Near, It’s Here, It’s. . .Actually, Pretty Good

In today’s Online Media Daily, the always astute Gavin O’Malley reports on the financial turnaround at America Online, sketching out its transformation from Time-Warner deadweight to rising star.  Most of the improvement, O’Malley reports, derives from some good acquisitions and strategic changes.

But this raises my favorite subject: What does the user experience at AOL? 

The short answer: Pretty much what they’ve experienced since 2005, when the service was opened up the world gratis.

But a major renovation is imminent–only “a few days” away, if such promisory notes can ever be trusted. [It may be here already: After I visited the the beta preview page and returned to AOL.com, the beta site was live in my browser. I have no idea whether the new site is live to all now.]

At first pass, the updated AOL eerily resembles Yahoo–so much so that it almost looks like a re-skinning of the Yahoo home page.. [Beta testers have been vocal on this matter in AOL's beta blog.]

That [non-] issue aside, the site seems prepared to do a few smart things well:

A high degree of customization: wide page, narrow page, red page, blue page, this module, that module, etc. Common customization features, but all good.

Snag is the AOL term of art for RSS [an excellent move. The phrase RSS has always struck me as doomed to geek jargon, a word that will only slow mainstream adoption]. Click “snag” and you get a pull-down that will one-click the feed to the usual suspects–Netvibes, Pageflakes, MyAol (duh), even Google and Windows Live.

A goosed search function. The preview page promises the ability to “search less and discover more.” Hmm. We’ll see. This sounds a bit like one of those “eat more/weigh less” diets to me. My few searches produced results that resembled Google’s as much as the site itself resembles Yahoo. 

A local-info module that appears at least state-of-the-field.

Vastly improved news, gussied up with all the proper 2.0 features: Navigation by tags; a blogged-about tagcloud; left-nav links to most read/most commented on/most recently commented on [nice touch there].; right nav to more conventional presentation of news headlines with links, plus selected blogs. I was surprised how much news I wanted to read was presented via the various entry points. Most insufferable feature: The idiot instant “polls” that sit next to major stories like “kick me” signs. [Note to AOL.com project team: You have one week to remove them.]

A video service that’s more easily navigated than most, and gives signficant prominence to professional/commercial videos. There is also a promise (threat?) that the service will offer paid content. Life being what it is, like all video 2.0fferings AOL’s features way too much UGC [Ugly Goofy Crap]. My view of the video service was limited by the fact that–and I report this without bitterness–video pages crashed my allegedly-stable-as-Linux IE-on-Vista brower repeatedly.

There will be more to say. The site will inevitably evolve. It may improve.

Whether it matches the company’s rising financial fortunes. . .that’s another matter.

  

Ning: A Grown-Up MySpace, a New Web Platform

The main purpose of this blog is to look at emerging Web features as they move from the overheated giantism of, say, YouTube and Wikipedia, to more measured mainstream use. And so today I take up Ning.

The latest project of Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, Ning lets you set up your own social network outside the teen-graffiti-ed walls of MySpace or FaceBook.

A Ning network takes less than five minutes to set up. Choose a name, template and a set of widgetized features (text box, photos, video, blog, etc.) and you’re up and running. You are now proprietor of a social network. Just add people.

What strikes me about Ning is–its likeable social-networking-without-the-idiots premise notwithstanding–how much it resembles other plug-and-play platforms that let you build, with almost alarming ease, what is essentially a free Web site under a different name.

• Wetpaint.com lets you create a Web community using the wiki metaphor.
• Wordpress, the service upon which this blog rides, provides a growing suite of tools that help you turn a basic blog into a widgetized visitors center. [Ditto Brother Google's Blogger tool.]
• Netvibes started as a feedreader, but increasingly is a personalized multimedia content platform you can share with others.  
• Freewebs lets you build a free, utterly serviceable Web site with the same five-minute drill as the others on this list.

Remember how, just two or three years ago, we all proclaimed that blogs had pushed the cost of publishing on the Web to practically zero?

These emerging products are doing the same with rich-media Web experiences. What used to be the domain of html coders and fancy Web design houses is now in the hands of just about anybody with two index fingers and a $400 computer.

I know the primitive sites these tools create will never replace the nuanced, deep and well-developed sites that major enterprises need and want. But I know this: the marketplace often rewards easy-but-servicable over complex-but-better. And certainly most folks would prefer free to paid. I would not want to be trying to sell Dreamweaver  five years from now. 

Most Viewed/E-mailed/Ignored/Derided/etc.

Why do so many news Web sites offer the two-tab toggle between “Most Viewed” and “Most E-mailed” stories?

Let me quickly say that I think a reader-led remix of the news is a great idea. Online newspapers’ biggest problems is leaving so much good stuff buried. In this interactive mediabox we find ourselves playing in, it makes great sense to surface the material readers like the most. Liberate the news from the deskhounds who think they know what people want! Let the users vote with their index fingers! By offering these navigation options, newspapers are offering a more dignified version of Digg, so to speak.

[I should point out that some news sites still don't offer such navigable lists at all. If any of you are listening, can you please drop me a note and explain, in 50 words or less, why the hell not?]

But why only those two ways to slice of news? There are a few good exceptions:

• The New York Times offers three versions of “most popular”: e-mailed, blogged and searched.
• The great Guardian (if you like online news and haven’t visited, you owe yourself the treat) offers “most commented” and “latest” blogs. Deeper on the site, it presents “what you’ve been reading”–a cheery phrasing of “most popular.”
• The also-great Lawrence Journal-World&News dangles ”latest news” and “most discussed” way high up, above the fold. The LJ uses these two link lists as the primary entry point to the site’s content. 
• But by far the winner in the let-the-readers-rumble sweepstakes is USAToday, which has essentially turned its Web presence into a gloriously, brilliantly unsettling confection of editor- and user-driven content. Navigate by choosing “Top news” (editors’ choices, with reader comments and recommendations indicated) or “most popular” (users’ most read, commented, recommended and e-mailed). The Nation’s Newspaper, long derided as the colorful dimwit, has broken free from the MSM pack in its transformation for the new day. 

But why stop there with remixing? Why not:

• Most popular in your zip code?
• Most e-mailed by women?
• Most subscribed to by people in your line of work?
• Most lingered-over by non-subscribers?
• Most popular with users with a higher household income than you?

Of course, none of these would fly [although the link lists that resulted would be fascinating to see]. It’s not that media companies don’t have that information about users, or couldn’t easily get it. But using it would not be a wise move. 

As Brother Google has discovered, the peril isn’t in collecting users’ personal information. It’s in trying to use it.

So go ahead, let the users remix the news. For now, just don’t let them know you’re watching.

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