Canter on the democratization of media

Jonathan Peterson, a fairly new addition to the Corante blog media empire, has a good interview with Marc Canter about the democratization of media. Excerpt from part one here, because I still can't figure out why the Excerpt field in the MT tool doesn't display on my blog:

5 years ago the Interactive TV industry standardized on set top boxes with 8Meg of memory- which were, at that time, already 5 years old. So when 20 million boxes finally got out to the market they were delivering an experience that was almost 10 years behind customer expectation. OpenTV and Liberate were stuck trying to get these boxes to do something interesting - good luck!

Note to the estimable Hylton Jolliffe: Two things the Corante site desperately needs:

(1) Lose the fixed font size in your cascading style sheet for the site. I've heard from hundreds of readers who won't even bother visiting otherwise worthy sites with content that's just plain unreadable on many, many PCs (such as mine, where the text is smaller than a speck on a flea's shoulder). Worst of all, fixed font CSS disables the user's Increase Font Size button. This has been a personal crusade of mine -- as well as of Jakob Nielsen -- for the past couple of years.

(2) Would be nice to get a printer-friendly version of all your great blogs. Just don't have time to press my nose to the screen to read them all on the PC.

Here's the Movable Type default CSS coding for body type:

font-family:verdana, arial, sans-serif;
color:#333;
font-size:small;
font-weight:normal;
line-height:120%;

The Saratoga invades Iraqi web space

Sheila proves again today she's got game. She picked up on Doc's short posting about Operation Desert Hack and ran with it.

Seems the Iraqi officials behind http://www.iraqtv.ws/ may have let the domain registration lapse. So an enterprising former Navy midshipman (as I understand this) scooped it up and published a site that slams Saddam as a murderer (and, absurdly, apparently calls on Iraqis to renounce their Muslim religion and embrace Christianity).

Sheila emailed the site operator and posted his explanation for the "legal hack" here. Strange and fascinating stuff.

Google + Blogger = Bloogle?

Chris Sherman, associate editor of Search Engine Watch , puzzles out some theories about Saturday's surprise announcement that Google is buying Pyra and its Blogger software. Theorizes Chris:

First, Pyra has over 1 million registered users, with about a quarter of those actively publishing weblogs. For the most part, these blogs are ad-free, offering an appealing distribution channel for Google's AdWords text based ads.

Second, Google could use the links created by webloggers to enhance its news service. Even though Google's news crawlers are constantly updating Google News' 4,000 sources of information, alternative internet sources are gaining a reputation for breaking important news stories more quickly than traditional media sources.

For example, the New York Times reported that the first hint of problems that doomed the space shuttle Columbia appeared on an online discussion eleven minutes before the Associated Press issued its first wire-service alert.

Intriguingly, news of Google's Pyra acquisition was broken by San Jose Mercury News tech journalist Dan Gillmor on his weblog, moments before Pyra CEO Evan Williams "announced" the news to the audience at the "Live from the Blogosphere" event via a projected screen from the presentation laptop -- by clicking a link to Gillmor's weblog!

Charles has more on the move here.

Designing HTML newsletters

I asked a friend, Jay Small, publisher of the Sensible Internet Design Letter (up to his 25th issue this week), for advice on creating an HTML email newsletter, since I'm on the board of directors of a soccer organization and we're considering new ways to reach our membership.

I got more than I bargained for. Jay, who oversees news and operations for eight Belo sites, sent this lengthy pearl of wisdom for would-be HTML newsletter editors. I'll republish it in full here, with his permission.

-- My site runs on an ISP that allows both PHP scripting and a small MySQL database, in addition to the standard HTML documents. I pay $100 per year for the whole thing. Hosting has gotten that cheap.

-- Because I have those features in my package, I can download and use any of several open-source software packages for my mail list. It so happens I chose MyMail (available at http://www.codingclick.com/), and I am using a generally stable public beta version, 1.0.b3. This package manages Web- or e-mail based subscriptions, unsubscriptions and confirmations of both -- plus the newsletter archive.

-- I just think it's good newsletter karma to make subscribing and unsubscribing very easy, and to confirm both decisions. MyMail does so through encoded URLs in confirmation e-mails. One regret about MyMail: it does not provide an easy way (that I have found) to allow users to switch between plain and HTML versions. I hacked a way for them to do that, but all it does is send me a message so I can change their settings in the database. Not exactly automatic, but every newsletter program has its shortcomings.

-- If you're not inclined to deal with the inevitable glitches of open-source scripts, or if you don't have a database-driven hosting package, you still have options for managing newsletters. You're probably already aware of free newsletter services from Topica and bCentral -- free because they'll piggyback ads on the messages you send. If you're trying to make money with a newsletter, that might not work. But people I know who have used them, especially for non-commercial newsletters in which the advertising makes no difference, say they're pretty easy to work with.

-- As for formatting the e-mails themselves, depending on the nature of content, you can't go wrong with plain text for starters. The first dozen or so of my newsletters were sent only in plain text, even though my subject matter is Internet design. And I rarely found plain text much of a hindrance. Even now, after I started offering both plain and HTML versions, I seldom call graphics into my HTML letter. The best reason to have it is the ability to link to referenced sites contextually (in plain text, I still have to pull out my related links into a block at the bottom). For what it's worth, among my subscribers, it's roughly 10 HTML subscribers to every one plain-text subscriber.

-- I'm still learning the best ways to format the HTML letter. In fact, last night's edition had some new formatting in it that I still need to tweak. I had originally done the HTML version with each tag styled individually (think [h3 style="font-size:1.5em;line-height:1.1em"]
every time I needed a heading). My reasoning was that locally applied styles stood the best chance of compatibility across the many e-mail clients that read HTML. But man, that got unwieldy in a hurry. Now I have styles abstracted into the head of the newsletter, and it's easier to manage. But I saw how the letter looks in the Yahoo! Web mail client, and it didn't handle relative text sizing very well. The type was tiny. So, although I'm generally an advocate of using relative text sizes to allow users to resize type to taste, in this case I may have to resort to fixed pixel sizes.

-- If you view source on my HTML letter, you will see I stick very closely to a limited set of HTML tags: [h1], [h2] etc. for headings, unstyled paragraph tags, anchors, and never any Javascript. I let the style sheets do the work of setting colors, margins and text sizes in the e-mail clients that support them, and because the tagset is so basic, I'm comfortable that the letter would look OK even with very limited HTML/CSS support.

-- If I need to present a lot of visuals, rather than call them into the e-mail newsletter, I tend to turn the letter into a glorified Web link. I'd rather people have the choice to click through to a Web site with graphics than wait for a bunch of screen shot examples in their e-mail. I'm especially conscious of that for modem users, because I spend a lot of nights poring through my own e-mail using bad modem connections in hotel rooms.

-- Some e-mail delivery software, and some e-mail clients, will handle "multipart" messages that, in effect, contain both plain and HTML versions in one file. I've found support for multipart so inconsistent, however, that I avoided it.

-- Most important: once you get a design in HTML that you like, and have selected a delivery service or software, set up a "friends and family" test list and send your design variations to people running as many different e-mail clients (Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Mac Mail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail etc.) as you can find to compare. You can always sign yourself up for throwaway Web mail accounts to test those yourself. Every week, I still have my own newsletter delivered to a couple of throwaways so I can track any delivery or styling bugs -- such as the unfortunate hiccup last night that sent my newsletter to all subscribers twice. :-)

More recent stuff

BBC News' new look
British journalist and author Mike Ward has a new piece up in OJR: The New and Improved BBC News.

Nano-publishing
Dan had a great upclose look at Nick Denton's nano-publishing empire last week. By coincidence, Rusty Foster is doing a piece on the same subject for OJR.

OJR Editors Log
For those who haven't seen it, OJR launched an editors weblog a couple of weeks back. A handful of us are trying to do short, punchy, almost-daily items.

Reader photos
Like this effort by BBCNews.com to involve readers in the news process.

Critic says newspapers go easy on Bush
Author and media critic Mark Crispin Miller was interviewed in E&P last week. And now he's taken his barbs to a New York theater in the one-man show "Bush Are Us."

The secret to System Restore

By the way, one of the ugly little discoveries I made during Blue Screen of Death Week was that you have to manually go in and set a specific restore point in order for Windows XP's System Restore function to work. Funny nobody ever told me that. I'd been gliding along for the past year, naively assuming that should a new application royally screw up my OS, I could always hit the System Restore option.

That assumption came to a screaming halt 10 days ago when I hit System Restore, only to learn that I could restore my OS's condition to the pristine state of ... 3 hours before. Jesus good night. Why not at least a default of a operating system condition backup every six months?

Blurring the editorial-advertising line?

Catching up on some items I would have blogged last week were it not for my Blue Screen of Death Week. Here's one:

News.com ran a story last week about the recent trend of news sites like CNN.com adding paid search results. Fascinating issues here. In OJR and elsewhere I've explored the ethical issues involved in sponsorships, search engines, ecommerce and the lines that need to be drawn.

Always like to hear from non-journalists, though, about how you see the editorial-advertising relationship on online news sites, and whether you think certain sites go too far in accommodating advertising interests.

Multimedia conversations

Marc C. is onto something big here: multimedia conversations. It's part of a larger discussion Marc is helping to drive about open standards. He invites your thoughts.

The online hunt for blank DVD-Rs

Hmm. Gotta wonder about some of these online retailers. Iíve got 2 Apples with DVD-burning Superdrives, and I've heard that Appleís DVD-Rs offer consistently high reliability, so I've been scouting around for them. No luck in local retail stores, natch. So I turned to online merchants. (I used to work for two quasi-Web merchants from 1999 to 2001.)

Found a five-pack of Apple DVD-Rs at PC Connection for $23, but it was hard to swallow the $8 shipping charge since I know the markup on that is at least 100%. The total at an online merchant called Max-something came to $30, with a $14 shipping charge as lowest option. Absurd. I was about to give up when I wandered over to the Apple Store online and, lo and behold, there they were. Total price: $16.18, including tax and free shipping.