Apiculture

What Ever Happened to ...

English.

Not that it should be the lingua franca of the Web, but if you decide you're going to do business in it, then doesn't it behoove one to at least try to get it right?

This rant is prompted by a Mashable! post on a new service called Wikio. The service is supposed to be a social-news wonder -- a hybrid of Google News and Technorati and Digg. That remains to be seen. Unless you're one of those invited to test the French-language version of the site, right now the English version is good only for entertainment value. Right now, the home page simply offers a chance to register as a test user: "If you want to test drive and help us improve our beta version, enter your mail hereafter." Hereafter? Nice touch. It's even more fun when you register:

Hello,

You just subscribed to be part of the beta testers.
You should receive your login/password in a near future.

"In a near future" is a concept that simply wouldn't occur to most native English speakers this side of James Joyce. It is a delightful idea.

Beyond bashing these guys for their machine-translator English, there is a serious point. Turn the situation around, and imagine a U.S.-based site offered to a French or German or Japanese audience in what amounts to pidgin. The site would be laughed off as ridiculous, and deservedly so. So for Team Wikio: Don't go any further without finding someone who knows how to address your intended audience in its language.

Eye tracking Web usability | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

Eye tracking Web usability | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com.

A writeup of a study be Jakob Nielsen, who is usually referred and deferred to in the same fashion as this story does, as a "user interface guru." What I find absorbing here is the attempt to figure out how people physically respond to what they see on their monitors.

"The real highlight [of the study] is that peoples' eyes flitter fast across pages. Very little time is allocated to each page element, so you have to be brief and concise in communicating online," Nielsen said. "They don't look in on, across the lines of a page, and often fixate on something, such as the first few words of a headline, for only a tenth of second. The right-hand side is often never in view of the eyes. People look down the pages in an 'F' pattern [see example on the left], with a few stripes at top–the first one longer than the second–and then down the long vertical stripe to see if is any else. Sometime the track turns into an 'E' pattern but it's usually an F."

Complexity

Ray Ozzie, quoted in The New York Times today on Microsoft's problems with its new Windows Vista operating system:

In an internal memo last October, Ray Ozzie, chief technical officer, who joined Microsoft last year, wrote, "Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration."

Garbage In ...

Today's reading: Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal does a sort of Barbara Ehrenreich Lite turn and lives life as a lowly Web "content creator." Gomes solicited work writing content for online sites. He discovers that the work is laughably poorly paid and that the sites soliciting material are really only interested in reworked boilerplate:

"Understanding what's happening requires a lesson in modern Web economics. If there is a topic in the news, people will be searching on it. If you can get those searchers to land on a seemingly authoritative page you've set up, you can make money from their arrival. Via ads, for instance.

"Then, to get your site ranked high in search engines, it's best to have "original content" about whatever the subject of your site happens to be. The content needs to include all the keywords that people might search for. But it can't be just an outright copy of what's on some other site; you get penalized for that by search engines.

"Hence, there has been an explosion of demand for 'original content.' ... You'd think this would be a godsend for writers. Hah.

"Curious to learn more about the process, I bid on some writing jobs on the Web sites where these transactions occur. (I described myself quite honestly: as a Journal reporter interested in freelance work who might also write a Journal story about writing for Web sites.)

"I managed to get underbid on numerous jobs before snaring one from a Web entrepreneur I would come to know as 'Whirlywinds.' I would have to write 50 articles, each 500 words long. Topics to be assigned. Pay: $100. For everything."

Yeah, 25,000 words for $100; that's .25 cents a word. Not surprisingly, Gomes approaches the job as an experienced, highly paid journalist would. The first article he turns in is the product of some actual research and reporting (even if the reporting consisted only of "interviewing" colleagues at the Journal). But spending a couple of working days on that reduces his pay to just 15 cents an hour, though, and reality sets in. The real "original content" game involves touching up material copied and pasted from other websites. Gomes begs off when he's asked to commit what amounts to plagiarism.

Gomes correctly points out that what lies at the bottom of this junk-content phenomenon is the widespread effort to game Google and the other search engines, which despite their relative sophistication are not smart enough by and large to distinguish between sites producing authoritative information and those that are merely ripping them off.

My colleague Ted says he thinks the proliferation of bad content is the search engines' fault: In essence, they've created a market for crummy content that imitates good content. Maybe so -- but no matter how smart search engines get, people will try to exploit them if they believe they can make a few bucks in the process. In the short run, anyway, this points up the importance of human intelligence as an extra filter in the content-analysis process.

Technorati Tags: journalism

Dreaming the Possible Dream

Ted is too busy right now playing with PHP -- though playing might not be the right word, given the look on his face -- to blog this, so I will:

John Battelle's Federated Media Publishing is off to the races -- it's even hiring. The operation obviously deserves more than this cursory nod, but:

When I was still at The San Francisco Examiner -- pre-1996 -- I was invited to speak at a science writers' conference at Stanford. The subject, as I remember it, was on how the World Wide Web might change things for writers and publications. A question arose as to whether the Web might provide new self-publishing opportunities for writers. My private experience with the Web at that point consisted of posting a few pages I created in primitive HTML on several topics of interest (the Web hardly ever forgets: the site is still up). I had already happened upon some neat resources from avid individuals out there, but the notion of a simple personal website having any commercial life seemed remote. My take on the future, as it looked then, was, "The world's never been short of opportunities to become poor doing something you love." The line got a gratifyingly big laugh. But I meant what I said; that's the way the Web looked to me then.

Federated Media looks like a step toward achieving the impossible dream -- the ability of lone-wolf Web publishers to make a living, or maybe even a little more, doing something they love. Battelle's effort isn't the first to try to get into the business of serving as business agent for content creators on one side and as ad rep on the other (admittedly, that's a rough take on what they're about). But it's coming forward at a time when the self-publishing sphere has matured; independent online publishers now command an audience that advertisers are looking for ways to reach.

All that having been said, Federated doesn't appear to be working with just anyone, to start. Its first cluster of publishers is a who's who of the most successful and influential blogging/independent publishing operations out there, including BoingBoing, Metafilter, TechCrunch, Om Malik's Broadband Blog, and Battelle's own Searchblog. OK -- that's just smart business. The reality is that if you want to be your own boss in this new publishing world -- if you hope to pay the bills by the sweat of your blog -- you'll need to respond to the market. Neither Federated nor anyone else is going to help you make a killing on your inspired navel-gazing or tip on how to spin cathair into yarn.

One more thing I like about Federated: Its statement on editorial values: "In addition to establishing a devoted following, each blog in the FM fold subscribes to a core set of values: Strong point of view, factual accuracy, engagement with the community, responsibility, integrity and transparency."

That's actually something old media could learn from.

Pioneering the (New) New Journalism

Dan Gillmor lays out lessons learned in trying to promote the cause of, and create a new enterprise around, citizen journalism: From Dan: A Letter to the Bayosphere Community. It's a great post on both what it takes to start such an enterprise and why independent, non-traditional approaches to journalism and media are our future:

"My friend Esther Dyson says, wisely, "Always make new mistakes." Did I ever. But I learned from them, and from what did work. Here are some of the lessons:

* Citizen journalism is, in a significant way, about owning your own words. That implies responsibilities as well as freedom. We asked people to read and agree to a "pledge" that briefly explained what we believed it meant to be a citizen journalist -- including principles such as thoroughness, fairness, accuracy and transparency. Although some cynics hooted that this was at best naive, we're convinced it was at least useful.
* Limiting participation is not necessarily a bad idea. By asking for a valid e-mail address simply in order to post comments, you reduce the pool of commenters considerably, but you increase the quality of the postings. And by asking for real names and contact information, as we did with the citizen journalists, you reduce the pool by several orders of magnitude. Again, however, there appears to be a correlation between willingness to stand behind one's own words and the overall quality of what's said.
* Citizen journalists need and deserve active collaboration and assistance. They want some direction and a framework, including a clear understanding of what the site's purpose is and what tasks are required. (I didn't do nearly a good enough job in this area.) ...

* Although the participants -- citizen journalists and commenters -- are essential, it's even more important to remember that publishing is about the audience in the end. Most people who come to the site are not participants. They're looking for the proverbial "clean, well-lighted place" where they can learn or be entertained, or both.

The entire post is well worth reading for anyone grappling with questions about the future of media.

Technorati Tags: journalism