The 2.D’oh! Weekly Round-Up, Vol. VI

Time for our weekly look at recent missteps, mischief and meaty meals in 2.Otown:

Religious devotion to Web video  

To continue yesterday’s jeremiad on my continued skepticism about Web video, check out this excellent entry from PBS’s new-media-guy-at-large Mark Glaser. His Media Shift column explores some more obscure applications of Web video including–I swear I am not making this up–a beta site named JewTube.

And while’s we’re discussing video, take a look at a sharp comment to yesterday’s Video Is Hideo post, in which Smoothspan discusses how video can accommodate different information acquistion styles in addition to, um, mine. His comment links to a longer blog entry of his.

Mommy, Make It Stop

A provocative entry on a Web site for U.K. journalists explores the question whether some yet undeveloped text-to-speech technology could, by delivering news reports by iPod, render print extinct. You can listen to a podcast of the column, by a reporter named Colin Crummy, here.

Oh, wait, no you can’t, there isn’t a podcast for the column. That link above lets you subscribe to the print edition of the journalism magazine. 

 Yes, but how is this different from Google?

A startup called LivingMemory is devoted to gathering comprehensive personal data about yourself and your loved ones, so it’s available on one set of Web servers forever, even after death.

And finally, our Noted Without Comment Feature

Dutch Royal Couple Edited Own Wikipedia Entry

Video is Hideo, Cont’d

There’s an excellent column today on Forbes.com by Louis Hau, in which he takes up the question of why nobody has found a way to make money from online video. Let me offer my two links’ worth:

1. I return to the work of one of my heroes, usability guru Jakob Nielsen, who two years ago did some excellent work heatmapping and eyetracking talking-head video on the Web, and demonstrating how useless it is in this environment.  (Don’t miss the “gaze replay recording” for some real-time fun.) His summary:

Eyetracking data show that users are easily distracted when watching video on websites, especially when the video shows a talking head and is optimized for broadcast rather than online viewing.

To remount my hobby horse: Despite all the money being thrown into online video, it remains a lousy Web experience. People want to use the Web–control their own clickstream, be masters of their own infotour–not passively receive media that comes at them on its own good time. I believe the only online video that will ultimately win an audience that can be monetized is content that is so compelling in its context, and so well suited to the medium, that people are willing to abide it despite a terrible user experience.

 I’ve been wrong before, sometimes twice a week. We’ll see how it plays out.

2. All of which makes yesterday’s announcment that Digg has created a separate navigation for video clips!all the less significant. If there is a meaningful distinction between the Digging of video and the rating of it on YouTube, it escapes me. Call Digg’s product MeTooTube.

I think the only significant thing about Digg’s move is that it illustrates that UGV is so rampant among the easily bored, easily amused youth wasting their precious lifeforce on the Web that Digg has to offer up the same stuff just to retain market share. If Digg has a plan to monetize its videos, that escapes me too. 

The title of this post, by the way, comes from a 50-year-old quote by another of my heroes, the retro-cool pop poet half-genius Ogden Nash. He was of course speaking of video delivered via a screen nearly as large as the one you hope to get on your next laptop.

I think I’ll go add that quote to the [slowly] growing list of 2.0-phorisms launched just yesterday on this very site. Only one civilian contribution so far. Please feel free to join the fun.

Google Health: Your Interest or Self-Interest?

Like its fellow Brobdingnagian competitor Microsoft, Google has plans to enter the world of personal health in–no surprise here–a big way.

Both firms plan to offer medical records, improved health search and other features designed to profitably entangle health consumers in the management of their personal health care. They’ll join the long-established pack leader WebMD, the deep-pocketed Revolution Health* and at least half a dozen other legit contenders for some market share of health consumers.

There are screen shots floating around of alpha versions of Google’s personal health record tools. You can preview a beta of Microsoft’s new health search on the Health and Fitness channel on msn.com.

But I was playing around with Google’s new health search the other day and was struck by a wave of nausea. 

Put “depression” in the Search Engine of First Resort and you’ll see (firstly) a couple of Adwords purchases stripped across the top of the results, then a second horizontal strip of links, which are choices by which you can filter your search further (i.e., Treatment, From Medical Authorities, Alternative Medicine). All of the following results are said to come from what are called Google co-op partners, described as trusted sources of health information. This appears to be true.

But if you do not click on one of those filters, you get Google’s organic results. And the first result when I put “depression” in the search engine was  depression.com, a site devoted to the deadly disease sponsored by. . . GlaxoSmithKline, maker of the depression drug Wellbutrin. Depression.com describes the disease and lists treatments that include talk therapy and, of course, medication.

The only medication the site acknowledges is Wellbutrin. Not Prozac. Not Paxil, not Zoloft or any of the newer drugs. It mentions electroconvulsive therapy, for god’s sake, but not Prozac.

This creates a potentially terribly misleading scenario. A user–aware that Google has a new health-related search method that filters out the heavily SEO’d, popularity-based claptraps that a Google search often produces–in good faith does a search on a disease name and gets results topped by one of the heavily SEO’d, popularity-based claptraps the new search is supposed to filter out.

To filter out commercially self-interested sites, a user has to click on one of the search-narrowing terms like “treatments.” 

To be fair, that top listing for depression.com is not purchased by GSK. They earned their top listing the old fashioned way, which is to say buying the best keyword url and then SEOing the hell out of the site.

Google may defend the practice of holding back its list of filtered, trusted sites until a user clicks to narrow the search.

But assuming at some point Google will promote its “health information from trusted partners” search results when it debuts its full health service next year, I believe it’s a misleading practice that should be changed by launch.

It also raises the big question posed by Google’s entry into the personal health space: Will users be able to trust a company whose economic engine is fueled by delivering economically self-interested advertising to users–and whose practice is to deliver popularity-based, SEO’d results in response to searches–to provide disinterested information on personal health? 

I don’t know the answer to that. But so far, the Mountain View collossus seems to be in danger of putting misleading information in front of some very vulnerable consumers who are looking for a credible source of information on a very serious matter.

It’s too early to call that sick. But not to consider it an early warning sign worth monitoring. 

Introducing: 2.O-phorisms

Today I’ve launched a new feature: 2.O-phorisms, a separate page of this blog that will be a gathering place for sharp one-liners that encapsulate key thoughts about building, using or living with the Web.

My inspiration came while writing yesterday’s entry, in which I cited this thought:

The challenge used to be getting the people to the content; now it’s a matter of getting the content to the people.

I have no idea who said it, but it strikes me as a wonderful phrase that captures a moment in Web evolution. I’m sure there are many others, and many better ones.

Have any to contribute? Please click on the 2.O-phorism tab above and add your own as comments. I’ll cut and paste them into the main entry, attributing them to you and in turn to whomever you got them from, so we’ll have one big list.

The rules:

Keep them short. I’d say one-liners only, but some will need two sentences or so.

They should be about building, using or living with the Web.

Please attribute whenever possible.

My hope is that we can crowdsource a list of inspirations, illuminations and provocations that will function as a kind of instant mini-course on Web life.

So leave a 2.O-phorism, and join the fun. I’ve started the list with two examples of unknown authorship.

MyTimes: The Final Capitulation, and It’s Beautiful

There’s been, amongst the High Geeknocracy, an almost conspiratorial indifference about the New York Times’ My Times feature, which lets users create a personalized start page. 

The service launched on Friday, Aug. 24. As of 11 p.m. on the 26th, there were precisely two (2!) results for “My Times” under Google News. (By contrast, “Necco wafers” turned up eight Google news stories.)

Even the blogpack has been fairly tame. If there is a theme among the more influential media blogs, it’s that the Times is coming to the remix party late, that it is wan, weak and wanting compared to Netvibes, Pageflakes, Yahoo, and Google’s roll-your-own Web tools. The Times is so old school!

I think they’re missing a big point: The deployment of MyTimes is a vivid demonstration of enlightened MSM capitulation to new media ecology. It’s a stirring, gorgeous fluttering of the white flag, a magnificent genuflection on bloody knees. I think that next month at this time I will still be able to stand by my judgment here: MyTimes marks an historic moment in the print-to-digital transformation.

The question is not whether the Gray Gal’s RSS-and-widget platform is better than the others. That’s immaterial. So are the Times’ business goals for deploying the new feature.

The significant thing is this: The keepers of one of the most sturdy, well-maintained walled gardens on the Web have mown the boxwoods flat and invited the woolly crowd to have a picnic. 

MyTimes is a tacit admission that users are now free to do with content whatever they wish–and the Times is willing to play host, offer drinks and hope nobody gets hurt. The Times understands that the users now officially control the asylum.

MyTimes not only permits but actively encourages users to add all sorts of not-authorized-by-the-Times content to their page. When MyTimes first appeared on my screen, I was startled to see that the main news module front and center was not the main NYT news feed, but. . .  Yahoo News. The photo feature? Not Times photojournalism, but the random eyedrops of Flickr.

Sure, the page does come pre-loaded with a lot of NYTimes stuff, but it’s possible to create a page that’s entirely free of New York Times content. In fact I did this just for sport–yanked in modules from the Wall Street Journal, Salon, Instapundit, even the insufferable Daily Kos. Out with Times Technology! David Carr be gone! Adam Nagourney, get outta town! TechDirt, New Scientist, Time magazine. . .step right up! I even added this very blog, just to make sure I could. (It’s easy: Just type in the url and the service fetches the RSS feed.)

Not a digit of Times content was left, except for a logo on top and a dim row of links at the bottom of the page. So powerless had the Times become that even when I added The Drudge Report module the site was unable to muster the energy to crash my hard drive.

I am quoting someone here, and I’m sorry I forget who it is: The task used to be getting the people to the content. Now the task is getting the content to the people.

The Times has shown it understands this, that it believes there is some economic value–or perhaps simple inevitability–in playing host to people’s customized information experiences. If they choose Times content, fine. If they don’t, well, that’s fine too. We’ll figure out how to pay the light bill.

My hope is that the rest of the players in big media–many of whom are still trying to fortify the walls of their gardens, in vain attempt to shield “their” readers from the corruptions outside–will now finally understand the new media deal too.

I invite all print-born news media leaders wringing their hands over the future to go to MyTimes, kill out all the New York Times content, and fill their page with whatever they want to. Add your own stuff, go ahead. Add your kid’s blog. Maybe even yours, if you have one.

Then, sit back, look at your screen, and ask yourself this: Now what?

The 2.D’oh! Weekly Round-Up, Vol. V

Mommy make it stop, cont’d

Your friends, the people who believe they should be President, will field questions from college students and other Web habituees when MySpace and MTV.com host “interactive real-time presidential dialogues.”

MySpace head flak Jeff Berman called it “a digital extension of the Iowa or New Hampshire living room where a candidate walks into someone’s home to have a dialogue.” The fun starts with John Edwards on Sept. 27.

No word yet on whether questions will be screened to ensure none come from registered sex offenders or illegal downloaders. 

Baby 2.0

BabyCenter.com, that leading destination for the reproductive set, has launched a beta version of a site renovation. It’s tacked on some of the usual 2.0fferings: UGC blogs, enhanced community features, and so on. Highlights: a personalized tag cloud which captures your own previous clicks, not those of the whole community; a smart use of personalization, which puts a box that features info to your specific week of pregnancy on your home page; and the inevitable, suspect promise to that search is new and improved to make it easier and faster to find what you want.

There is also a strange bifurcation of “questions” and “community.” Since most folks who participate in communities go there to ask questions, I hereby offer this prediction: Those two areas will be merged within, say, nine months.

Genuinely interesting story of the week

This contemplation of whether digital archives should ever be altered to correct the record, respond to veiled (or not) lawsuit threats, etc. The column by Elizabeth Zwerling appears on the site Online Journalism Review.

Items from Onion circulated fraudently as truth? Or signs of the coming Apocalypse? 

This week the Mountain View search engine colossus proved that its ambitions are not merely for global domination: It launched a new version of Google earth that takes on the stars.

And an article appeared in Business Week about aSmallWorld, [aka "Snobster,"] a U.K.-based invitation-only social network for. . .multi-millionnaires.

Noted Without Comment, cont’d

The digital newstand of the future? [A tip o' the fez to our friends at cyberjournalist.com]

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