Life is grand

A fascinating brief to the news print industry by Oliver Reichenstein:

News organisations cannot continue to ignore the global shift from institutionally controlled media to user controlled media. They have to redefine their processes and face the obvious question: Do we still need old media for news?

There are concepts in there but also pragmatic instructions on what to do.

Letters to the editor is often the most successful section of a newspaper. Why is that? Because web 2.0 is a new fashion that will disappear soon? Or because the curiosity in what real people think is human, all too human?

So true. Web 2.0 is the humanising of the web and the pulling down of the old guard’s walls. Not to destroy them but to include them in our global conversation.

1. Reduce number of banners per page to one.
2. Increase banner size.
3. Distinguish clearly between ads and content.
4. Kill all pop up windows.
5. Forbid animated and amateurish banners.

Funnily enough as much as I think the New York Times Reader is a failure (being a desktop-bound, closed app.) I do think their advertising is excellent. One per page, quality, non-intrusive.

Truth is: We need paper for books, yet we don’t absolutely need paper for news – it is just a nice to have option.

I don’t disagree with this but I think “digital paper” or ePaper can be added to the arguement. Static paper will disappear. Dynamic, reloadable ePaper will replace it (it has already been said ePaper will become cheaper than tree-paper.)

It isn’t that newspapers must go online and dump the physicality of paper. Rather that newspapers become true media two-way channels and allow any device to read their content. ePaper, laptops, mobile phones, TVs, desktop computers, billboards, train station walls and the side of blimps. These are display surfaces on which the news of the world can be read.

The Times Reader is an interesting project between the New York Times and Microsoft. For Microsoft it is a technology demonstration, in this case .NET 3.0 (WinFX really) and for the Times it is an exploration of delivering readable content to screens. The web and even most desktop software makes for a bad reading experience. Low DPI, wide blocks of text, poor fonts and, especially on the web, little if any typograhic control.

The Times Reader aims to make reading on the screen easy on the eyes. Using the Microsoft technology it offers the Times’ fonts, builds in readable columns and uses up all the screen real estate it can to present what looks very much like a print newspaper on your screen.

Here are a few screenshots of it in action though I recommend you download it and give it a go to see the layout technology at work (it is a Windows XP/Windows Vista only app, no Mac or Linux versions.)

When you first load it the app downloads a complete set of articles from the server. It then periodically synchronises allowing you to later use the app and read articles offline. As you can see it mimics a newspaper layout. On the right you will see some articles are just being displayed as headlines. If I made the window bigger the summaries of each would start to be displayed and the layout would change.

Along the top you have the different sections which smoothly flips the view from topic to topic.

Here you can see the front page after I have resized the window to a smaller area.

Clicking a headline/article takes you to the article view:

The article is nicely displayed in columns and flows around the image. You can see an advert in this screenshot but not all articles display an advert. If the full article was too long to fit on this one view then the page control (bottom right) would let me flip to the next page. It is a bit fiddly though as you have to click the little arrows rather than a bigger region.

You can also see the text-size control in the bottom left. As you adjust this the view automatically re-flows itself to fit. Honestly though the sizing is in steps and is quite jumpy. I’d have preffered something smoother.

You can go to the next article using the control near the bottom right. The arrows are once again a bit small but the transition to the next article is quite smooth.

An article has several tools one of which lets you annotate with a pen. Handy if a bit limited (other users can’t see it for instance.)

The search has three views one of which is this fluid diagram that shows an article with its assigned “topics” radiating out from it. Topics are much like tags.

Clicking on a topic takes you to a view which shows all articles tagged with that topic:

The other search view shows a grid layout of all stories that match your search, sorted by relevance (as indicated by the litte filled in dots):

Then onto the News in Pictures view which is very, very simple:

It simply takes all the photos in the paper and displays them one after the other with captions. A gallery would have been ideal and also links back to the originating articles.

I am not convinced of the usefulness of the What’s Read but it is an interesting view. It shows you each section with little squares that on roll-over display an article you have read. I would have liked an indicator next to each article title on any page to show that I have read it (much like links on the web change colour.)

All in all the Times Reader is interesting and works quite well. My main problem with it is that it is a separate, desktop app. bound to one OS. We need to get this technology into the browser.

Whatever Bill Gates’ impact on Microsoft in the past few years has been, today marks the end of an era as he steps aside and lets Ray Ozzie take the software reigns.

[Update]
Turns out TechCrunch was not far off the mark. PubSub’s “days are numbered”. A sad turn of events when good technology is wasted not by bad business but by politics.
[/Update]

One other thing I wanted to relay from the it@cork Web 2.0 Conference was that TechCrunch’s post about PubSub imploding was a tad exaggerated. I asked Salim what he had to say on the news and he said it was exaggerated. He said there were problems, that he had left the firm awhile back (over differences in direction) but that PubSub had many viable options for its future.

Makes you wonder what else TechCrunch is exaggerating.

Does anybody else think that the photographic world has become deathly boring of late? I keep tabs on DPReview and a few other photo news sites and haven’t read an interesting development in months. Take a look at the latest news from DPReview; A Sony DSLR that does nothing new, the Nikon D2Xs which is a subtle upgrade, some Nikon security software, HP and Fujifilm digicams that have no redeeming value, Microsoft’s JPEG competitor which is dead before it starts, conjecture about Canon and its film cameras… and then I fell asleep. The Luminous Landscape has its usual interesting stories but they aren’t really news or developments in the industry.

A year ago we were going nuts keeping up with Canon, Nikon, Fuji, Sony and the lads. It was exciting and fast paced. Today though we find ourselves with a strong, stable and developed line of cameras with little innovation happening. It isn’t a bad place to be but it is dull for anyone wanting to report photographic news.

Below the two RAM slots (at the base of the battery cavity) is where you’ll find the MacBook’s hard disk drive. Without disassembling the notebook, users will be able to quickly removing some protective aluminum shielding and lift the drive out of the computer.

Apple’s previous line of consumer notebooks, the iBook, required that an authorized service provider perform all hard drive replacements

Replacing the HD in a MacBook is easy. This is good news.