Saturday, October 17th, 2009
links for 2009-10-17
-
Kevin: A nice overview by Ken Sands of changes in site navigation and social network integration by US news sites. Ken makes some great points when he says: "Even the best designed newspaper Web site home pages suffer from what I call "linkorrhea." With so many newsroom constituencies to serve, designers typically end up linking to several stories from every section of the printed paper, as well as linking to Web-original content such as blogs, slideshows and videos. Add in multiple ad spots and the home page looks more like Times Square than, say, Google, the epitome of simplicity."
-
Kevin: Mathew Ingram with the Globe and Mail in Canada discusses 'walking the walk' of transparency after removing an article that he and his editors thought breached some of their editorial guidelines. Matt explains why they did and why they explained it: "My argument was twofold. By not responding, I argued that we were ignoring a conversation in which we should be taking part. And by removing something without explaining why, I argued that we were effectively breaching our trust with readers, in however small a way. While an editor slamming his own organization might be damaging to our brand, I argued that the trust of our readers was also a key part of our brand, and that we had to do everything we could to maintain it. That, I think, is the fundamental purpose of being open and honest in the first place." It's a great argument for transparency.
-
Kevin: I'm still getting my head around Google Wave. I think it can be a powerful collaboration tool, but I've still yet to have my aha moment with it. Like all tools, I need to figure out what it's good for and see if it fills any unmet needs that I currently have in the tools that I use.
However, my current scepticism about it aside, here is a great list of tools and gadgets for Google Wave.
-
Kevin: "CIOs who don't make the transformational jump from that old model to the new one of aligning IT with their companies' customers are hurting their companies and stunting their own careers." I write a lot about technology in the course of my work and think a lot about technology and IT in the course of my work, and I think there is a lot of value in this. In terms of news organisations, I'd have to say that from the website to the IT, too much technical focus tends to be put on internal needs that do not deliver value to audiences.
-
Kevin: "Google Webmaster Tools has just launched a “labs” section, where you’ll find new features that may be early in the development cycle and not quite as robust as the rest of the tools. The features available so far are Fetch as Googlebot, which lets you see exactly what Googlebot is served when it requests a URL from your server and Malware Details, which shows you malicious code snippets from your site if it’s been flagged as containing malware."
-
Kevin: "From direct mail to web design, A/B testing is considered a gold standard of user research: Show one version to half your audience and another version to the other half; compare results, and adjust accordingly. Some very cool examples include Google’s obsessive testing of subtle design tweaks and Dustin Curtis’ experiment with direct commands and clickthrough rates. (”You should follow me on Twitter” produced dramatically better results than the less moralizing, “Follow me on Twitter.”)
So here’s something devilishly brilliant: The Huffington Post applies A/B testing to some of its headlines. Readers are randomly shown one of two headlines for the same story. After five minutes, which is enough time for such a high-traffic site, the version with the most clicks becomes the one that everyone sees."
Loading ...