MSNBC: Bomb and Strafe the Flyovers, Please

The Bivings Report, a blog operated by the web consulting firm the Bivings Group, today has an excellent analysis of the redesign of MSNBC.com.

In short, there are plenty of things wrong with it, though I am not as sour as Todd Zeigler, author of the Bivings item. The tour of the new site is in some ways more effective than a lot of the site itself.

The MSNBC site adds the usual 2.obligitories:

• Discussions [called "message boards" under the "participate" tab]
• UGC solicitations branded “First Person”
• mobile and IM news updates
• more RSS feeds than I had the patience to count (four pages’ worth!)
• widgets (horrifyingly self-promotional; check out the Matt-and-Meredith news widget)

Best new feature: A very simple customization feature that lets you move, collapse and expand content modules on landing pages (say, the Asian-Pacific module under World news). You do this by nudging the module up or down the page with up or down arrows and then clicking the number of stories you want displayed in that module, from 0 to 15. You can for instance push the “Terrorism” module to the top of your page, opening it wide to include 15 stories, and bury and collapse “Europe” completely. (I do not intend that in the Rumsfeldian sense of “bury and collapse Europe.”)

Worst old feature: That easy-to-hate, entirely inexplicable left-rail navigation that, when overmoused, launches flyover submenus across the page until all content on the incumbent page is hidden by prompts to content elsewhere. Some of these sub- or sub-submenus get “stuck” in the extended mode and require a click (or several) to make them recede.

But it gets worse! The items on the TV program-specific navigation across the top (Dateline, Meet the Press, MSNBC programs, etc.) when moused over also spawn flyovers that obscure vast chunks of content. This means it is possible to nudge your mouse absentmindedly across the top and left hand navigations in succession and mask over all MSNBC content.

All I can figure is someone in a corner office insisted on keeping the flyover navigation, which in my estimation is one of the biggest and most public usability errors on a major media site. Can someone please explain?

Are Reporters Doomed? Cont’d

My good friend John Kelly, who’s in Oxford studying Proto-Neo-Techno-Journalism [or whatever it's called], posted on his Voxford blog an excellent and typically hilarious response to Brit media guy David Leigh’s provocation [published in print!] titled “Are Reporters Doomed?”

Essentially, Leigh says the focus on PNTJ ™ is too much about technology and not enough about journalistic values. As more non-journalists join the scrum, the values of what he calls “Slow Journalism” (by which he means high-quality traditional journalism of the sort that’s been delivered on paper for centuries) will be buried and lost.

Kelly says no, the new competition is good. Market competition will allow quality, experienced practitioners of journalism who embody the important journalistic values yet embrace new delivery platforms simultaneously to rise to the top of the ever-growing crap-heap online.

At the risk of bastard-slapping my good friend John Kelly, whose writing is excellent and typically hilarious, I fear both arguments may be motivated more by sentiment and self-interest than by what’s really good for readers/users/visitors/whatever they’re called.

Both guys seem to think that journalists–and by that they appear to mean the folks who are really good with words, did well in the Humanities in college, spend recreational time reading quality periodicals published on paper, and tend to think in that linear way so much exposure to nouns and adverbs can cause–should still be running the show and safeguarding the “values” family jewels.

But when I look at the PNTJ ™ landscape I see important creations that frankly none of these wordmasters could have conceived. To name three:

• The Issues Tracker at washingtonpost.com, by the wp.com politics team and DayLife
• The nytimes.com’s Debate Analyzer, created by the team of Shan Carter, Gabriel Dance, Matt Ericson, Tom Jackson, Jonathan Ellis, Sarah Wheaton
• usatoday.com’s Candidate Match Game, created by a team of nine folks (sorry, their names were on a flash module, so I couldn’t cut and paste)

These are powerful acts of journalism that involve users with the substance of the ‘08 campaign. In my estimation, they are “better” journalism–if we define that as delivering facts to the public that engage and inform them on the vital events of our times–than these three papers’ A-list columnists are likely to produce on the ‘08 presidential race.

And yet: I suspect that as long as members of the linear-words-Humanities-New Yorker squad are running journalistic operations, they’ll still overvalue (and fund) 57-inch scene pieces and 60-inch policy thumbsuckers above the tools for advanced understanding cited above. They will continue to do this even on the papers’ Web sites, where the usability of that kind of work is even worse than it is in print. They will continue to whine that there is not sufficient revenue to find journalism in the public interest.

As Proto-Neo-Techno-Journalism ™ matures, the people who conceive and deliver journalism of the sort I’ve cited should increasingly run the show. If we don’t permit that to happen–if we fight it in the name of “values” and “integrity” and “journalistic tradition”–it may be time for the self-interested sentimentalists to stand down.

Friday Funnies: 23/6

When I heard that Barry Diller was launching a new comedy site along with the Huffington Post, I thought: Oh, great, let’s see what a scrambling media titan and a group of earnest liberals think is funny.

I’ll make this brief: 23/6 is one of the funniest things I’ve seen on the web since. . .well, let me think. A very long time.

My funny-on-the-web test consists exclusively of counting the flecks of spittle that land on my monitor that result from trying to restrain an explosive laugh. My first 10 minutes with 23/6 dampened my screen quite a bit. I think I see some bits of my tuna fish sandwich there.

Just a few highlights:

• “Dickipedia: Pervez Musharaf.”
• “Hillary’s Campaign Will Slap You Right Back.“
• “Pack of Cigarettes Has Added You as a Friend in Facebook“

The beauty of this stuff is how perfectly the folks behind this effort get the self-important mannerisms and hokey sense of “community” rampant on the Web. This is a brilliant effort at satirizing the web using its own toolkit.

Sad note: In attempt to justify itself, the parodies include little links to the “real” stories upon which they are based, creating an odd comedic experience. Those who don’t get the joke will presumably go ahead and read the article that will help explain the joke. What, then they go back and read the joke again? Can’t imagine that experience launching much spittle.

Anyhow, there’s nothing worse than someone trying to explain or analyze humor. Go to 23/6 right now. But I recommend flossing first.

I Can’t Digg It

Today comes speculation from the occasionally correct “RumorMonger” feature of the ValleyWag blog that the always-for-sale Digg is about to actually be sold, perhaps for somewhere between $300 million to $400 million. (See Michael Arrington’s head-shaking history of Digg-for-sale rumors.)

The RumorMonger wonders aloud whether the buyer will be, maybe, The Washington Post or the New York Times. Whatever.

To me this is just more evidence that the Bubble of Insanity continues its fearsome expansion, with investors who lack confidence in their ability to identify the Next Big Thing instead settle for vulgar overspending on the Last Big Thing.

Sure, whoever buys Digg gets a huge audience. But who are those people?

Anyone who spends much time on Digg (which I am not recommending) knows the web popularity service does not surface the most worthy or interesting material. Just about the only way to elevate even a very good story to the front page of Digg is to ask other Diggers and other friends to Digg it. This is a peculiar way to spend one’s time–a coercive, small, even mean act of rebellion against the very wisdom-of-the-crowds spirit on which Digg was founded.

Anyone who doubts me should consider: As I write this, the most Digg’d item that comes up via a Digg search using the term “Digg” produces the following top result: “The best video of Ron Paul: everyone please digg!!!!! [15,339 Diggs]

Among the Top 10 Diggees at the moment of this posting, 4 fall under the category of political paranoia (the draft is returning, something about a massive dragnet of all citizens), 2 are odd stories about sex, 1 is a techie inside joke about blocking popups. Two are genuinely interesting: a hauntingly beautiful time-elapsed graphic image of one day’s air traffic, and a chart that appears to show how the U.S. dollar has been sliding during the Bush years. The guy who submitted that one had Digg’d nine other stories within a two-minute period six hours ago.

Now I have never met a Digger–by which I mean one of the people who actually spends his or her (but more often his) time asking others to Digg stories, and Digging theirs in return. But I have a hard time imagining what goes through his head, why he chooses to spend time this way, what he does in his, how you say, “free” time.

I urge anybody who is seriously considering buying Digg for an amount that could say, fund the Iraq War for several weeks to back away from the balance sheets and metric reports and spend some time at the elbow of a prolific Digger.

Is that the audience you want to buy?

NY Times’ Debate Analyzer and Hillary’s Excruciating Moment

The argument over Hillary Clinton’s recent debate utterances on illegal aliens’ drivers licenses continues. But if you want to get the raw data to inform your opinion on what-she-said and what-they-said, you can use one of the most ingenious interactive tools to have emerged during this political season: The New York Times’ “Debate Analyzer.”

This tool presents a visual rendering of who said what during the debate, with popups of the transcript for each speaker’s comments. It’s easy to see immediately where Hillary misstepped and her competitors pounced so quickly.

Look at the sixth column from the left. See all those tiny lines gathered together about two-thirds of the way down? Each represents a different speaker making a comment; visually you can tell each comment is fairly brief. (Compare it to the longer chunks of speech represented elsewhere on the graphic.) Even if you didn’t know what happened during the debate, just by scanning the graphic visually you can tell someone’s in trouble.

Now pass your mouse down into that exchange and start at 1:39:44 (1 hour, 39 minutes and 44 seconds). That’s where Brian Williams tees up the question about what Clinton had previously said about New York Gov. Mark Spitzer’s plan to grant driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. Next you’ll find Hillary’s dodge of an answer.

Now pass your mouse down the page one line at a time and witness the longest 2 minutes and 30 seconds of Hillary’s ‘08 campaign, if not her life as a political rhetorician.

My point is that the Hillary Learns to Drive moment provides a perfect opportunity to see how powerful well-deployed web technology can be in political journalism.

The Debate Analyzer is not even a “Web 2.0″ application–no “wisdom of the crowds,” social community, collaborative knowledge, blahblahblah. Let’s call it “Web 1.99999″: perhaps one of the most evolved applications of interactive visualization of important political content to date.

It provides the raw material for political debate in an unprecedented manner. You want the tools of democracy at voters’ fingertips? You’ve got it here.
As for the content analysis, I’ll leave that to others.

The Coming Google Boycott?

There have been attempts to boycott Google over the years. I sense a much larger, diffuse but potentially powerful one is on the way.

In previous boycott action:

• In 2003 the company was accused of complicity with the National Security Agency in its attempts at citizen surveillance; boycotts were organized. And almost whooly ineffective.
• In 2006 its decision to “censor” [whether that term really applies is open to debate] its search results at the direction of the Chinese government drew equally ineffective boycott attempts.
• Along the way other purported sins–among them Antisemitism and mistreatment of Adwords customers–have prompted the B-word.

But these are issue-driven boycotts. I’m wondering whether something bigger, a sort of ABG (Anything But Google) moment is upon us.

When Brother Google declined to outbid Microsoft for a share in Facebook, some interpreted it as a sign that Google will build up its own largely-ignored-in-the-U.S. social networking site, Orkut. [It is also apparently going to create open standards for social community applications, to force Facebook and MySpace, et al. to open up their users to the larger Web.]

But if Google plans to compete for users in the social networking space with its own brand–at the same time it attempts to insert itself in the middle of the mobile phone market, and place itself in the center of personal health care with Google Health, and plow ahead with a big, potentially anticompetitive merger over tough industry and government scrutiny–the Mountain View juggernaut may hit a tripwire. Add the $700 per share stock price and it could hit a wall.

I sense, in tinny noise from the blogosphere and in the grumbles of civilians I know who like to kvetch about their dealings with personal technology, an accumulating resistance to Google hegemony. It’s awfully similar to what happened to Microsoft when developers, state attorneys general, the federal government, business users, IT managers and consumers all began, for different reasons, to oppose the Redmond colossus.

This led such things as traction for open source software, Linux, software-as-service, competition in the IT backend market, the rise of Firefox–in short, to humbling Ballmer & Co. a bit. From my viewpoint, the world has become a better place for it.

And now, my ear-to-the-rail picks up vibes that it’s Google’s turn, with consumers and businesses alike moving to an Anybody But Google phase. Not just for reasons of fears about privacy and company bigfooting, but simply because there’s a growing sense that as it has grown the Don’t Be Evil crowd has lost the capacity to live by its own motto.

I’m not organizing or advocating a boycott. And Lord knows nobody’s search engine is about to topple Google from that pinnacle, Ask.com’s funny but sadly desperate TV ads notwithstanding. But I feel a big ABG phase is about to begin.

I, for one, plan to make strictly ABG decisions about my cell phone.

For as long as I can hold out.

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