“I’d like to scale back my subscription to just weekend delivery” I said over the phone to the circulation department. That was last Tuesday, and my last weekday paper arrived on that Wednesday. Just two days later I learned that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was up for sale. I felt like I killed it single-handedly.

I was one of the few—a young web-centric professional that still carried a daily paper subscription. I’ll always feel a print publication offers a lot of important advantages over an electronic edition—and that comes from someone who’s spent years helping people make websites.

Opportunities

I want to see the P-I continue, if not as a conventional print publication then certainly as a web-only production. The latter I feel is a giant opportunity, even though it means cutting a huge amount of jobs and really scaling back the journalistic power of the paper…exactly what you’d rather never have happen…when the bottom line interferes with good journalism.

What the P-I does have is a huge chance to reevaluate what it means to be a modern news institution. Here’s what I want from my local paper—I hope it can happen.

• Community

  First and foremost I want a publication that makes me feel like a part of a whole. Individual neighborhood sections, detailed user profiles, customizable start pages, alerts sent to my mobile or email address based on my news preferences, neighborhood and current location.

  

  I want to be able to find friends and family, see what they are reading. I want the web “paper” to be a community square, with all the advantages you’d get walking down your street—I don’t want just another information fire hose. The P-I has a good start on these tools, but I want more.

• Valuable Ads and Services

  Services aren’t a bad thing, but invasive and irrelevant advertising on the web is. How many times have a I seen someone tear apart the P-I to get to a full Circuit City pullout? Many, many, times…I often wonder why you can’t do that online for the users that want to browse.

  Classifieds? Hasn’t Craigslist ruined that for everyone? I’d love to see a local paper compete with their own free service, but use local knowledge and a superior toolset to that of Craigslist. (Simple mashups like housingmaps.com are ridiculously valuable and pretty easy to implement.) In an ideal world, smart tools and neighborhood specific pages should make ads valuable to everyone viewing the page.

• Local, Local, Local

  Let the AP feeds cover the national and international topics. I want to know what’s in my backyard. Anyone working for a news institution online should look long and hard at EveryBlock, they’re doing a lot of things right!

That’s just a few words from a subscriber that knows a lot about the web, but not a lot about the newspaper industry. I hope the P-I lives on, as the great institution it is. You can read all about the ongoing transition on The Big Blog.

Apologies for the following—buzzwords used indiscriminately:

The introduction of location based services – specifically social networking tools integrated into mobile devices – is leading toward new battle lines being drawn between consumers and social software developers.

(Read this NYT article from last year for background information, or check out this recent Information Week article about a related privacy kerfuffle.)

The basic questions here are ones that have been asked for decades, and certainly have been hotly debated in the midst of web services in the past few years. Everyone is concerned about what’s on their Facebook profile, but that’s still a representation of a person, a construction of their making, a personality meant for a special purpose hosted and shared via remote servers.

Contrast that with social services that connect people on the ground. All of a sudden, the buffer established by your web persona is non-existent. When you’re sitting in a bar and others have access to your location, they can walk up and chat with you physically, which is obviously much different than leaving a casual comment on a blog.

Unless software developers are very cautious about making privacy features that are self-explanatory and effective, there will be widespread concern. It’s happening already, and it will continue. (And what I really mean is, there will be media sensationalism and unnecessary panic en masse.)

The physical disconnect of social web communication is non-existent in meatspace, you don’t communicate with a constructed persona, but your own self in person. (Which is all well and normal, it’s what we all call humanity I believe.) But we now have the tools to receive information boosted by web, GPS, and cellular technologies that overlay a data layer upon that good old meatspace. There you have the power of interconnectedness and instantaneous information retrieval just like the web as a platform, but with the ability to reach out and touch someone physically.

It’s a problem that will be solved. Eventually, but not without a few bumps along the road. Most people today are more comfortable leaving tracks and signs, leaving data in their wake than they are broadcasting it in the flesh.

Candidates for office leave signs on the roadsides to advertise themselves, they don’t stand on street corners proselytizing. (There’s a certain stigma attached to standing on a street corner with a sign isn’t there?) Leaving information about what you’ve done and where you’ve been is much different than broadcasting your location. Layers of trust must be built into the interactive platform and utilized sensibly by the consumers. It will be fun watching the sparks fly.

Blog hiatus over! I’m back, writing again, posting pictures and the like. I’ve finally taken the time to put together a new design for the site with the goal of bringing a more photoblog-like experience to my posted pictures. Check that out over at 17mm, and please don’t be shy in pointing out any glaring deficiencies. It all needs a bit of code massaging and there will be many tweaks in the future, but I’m happy with the separation of the photo-centric posts away from my text-based diatribes.

“Dig Deep” is not only the name of the new theme, of course for the grass + soil + sullied paper composition, but is a bit metaphorical…with me of course there’s always a metaphor. It was difficult to work this all out in a satisfying way. Certainly the structure is a drastic improvement. I’d say I’m about 75% happy with the overall result, and it’s certainly good enough for me to look beyond the superficial design details and get on to what’s of genuine importance…sharing words and pictures. There will be much more of that, oh yes!

Akamai and JupiterResearch Identify ‘4 Seconds’ as the New Threshold of Acceptability for Retail Web Page Response Times.

My own benchmark for page load times has always been “the three count.” It’s a simple rule I’ve constructed based on a bit of usability testing, feedback from friends, family, and of course my own lack of patience when sitting at a computer…waiting…for things to happen.

Say (out loud if you like for dramatic effect),

“ONE…TWWOOOOO…THREEEEE…”

…and if your page hasn’t loaded yet, you haven’t instigated some sort user interaction, or you haven’t clearly communicated your intentions, you’re going to have problems with your page.

Let’s have a moment of silence for tertiary navigation on the web.

The poor soul never really had a chance. What with the primary navigation soaking up all the glory and the proud secondary navigation cutting through the clutter. Just when designers and information architects really started to efficiently implement a 3rd level of navigation Google comes along with a minimalist search box and blasts it all to bits. How tragic an end for the web’s third tier.

Point →
Who wants to wade through three whole levels of navigation (or more!) when there’s a 90% chance a search’s top 10 hits the mark? It’s clutter, I’m glad to see it go.

Counter Point →
I want to wade. I miss it. Some searches suck, and as a user it’s nice to have an understandable hierarchy.

Take the mighty ‘Zon as a case study of the degradation of tiered web navigation. Just a few months ago Amazon moved away from a strip of tabbed navigation that highlighted a users’ frequently visited “stores.” There were usually around 8 tabs in total, with many of their labels running into two lines of copy.

This was well and good, I never disliked it, but I was always frustrated when there was a store I wanted to quickly navigate to that wasn’t readily available. Evidently Amazon was thinking the same way, because they drastically slashed their tabbed main nav, and added a whiz-bang DHTML pop-up window. (Click on “See All 32 Product Categories.”)

What this highlights is that the path from main navigation, to a secondary subsection, and then to a tertiary listing of products has been slashed to ribbons. Now via the prominent A9 powered search (cross-marketing bonanza), the home page can jump directly to a search, which in turn links directly to product pages. Quite a departure.

This also points out the increasing confidence Amazon has in their recommendations and other features dependent on your purchase and browsing histories as opposed to a “store” based navigation structure.

Last Gasps of the Subject Directory

Amazon is just one instance of the Googlizing of Web Navigation and the effective beginning of the end of the subject tree. I’ve always like subject indices and stepping through categories one by one, confident that whatever bucket that lay before me contained all of what I wished to uncover. That kind of categorization will always be attractive to me, and I’ll always seek it out every bit as often as I do a search box in any e-commerce application.

As far as search engines go, Yahoo, and Lycos have long dropped a subject directory from their respective homepages—and who ever bothers to go directory.google.com? Far too many clicks for this day and age I suppose. Ah well, hopefully I’ll always have dmoz.

Will subject indices and tertiary navigation be simply relegated to niche applications on the web or will they make a daring comeback as users become more accustomed to a larger variety of information management systems? Maybe in the end I should just forget about directories and tertiary navigation, and instead figure out “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb Search?”

Friday’s WebVisions was a fun affair—a lightweight event with good humor and valuable content. Frankly I’ve never been in a room with as many people before that debated the merits of various text-editors nearly as vehemently as they jostle the niceties of Photoshop and Firefox plug-ins. It was web-in and web-out, summed up nicely when I noticed (during my first presentation sit no less) someone posting digital pics of the opening speaker to Flickr while nearly simultaneously another PowerBook across the room hammered out a blog post linking to the same tagged pictures. (Hey—where the web isn’t quality at least it’s timely.)

Three Speaker Highlights

1. The Evolution of Flash Animation: Bedrock Revisted — Sandro Corsaro
   Structure isn’t Sandro’s bag, but amazing flash is. I’m glad I sat in on this one for a superb flood of flash animation tidbits, presented by a guy with a solid traditional animation background. Watch his reel for great sample of his work and a quick laugh.
2. Forward Thinking Design: Tips, Techniques and Typography — Cameron Moll
   Cameron’s presentation was a crash course in mobile web presentation, and while it first felt content-light, it was a giant leap forward in my understanding of production and delivery for mobile users and alternative user agents. I know it took a ton of work and I’m thankful, the product was first rate. An overview of his presentation is online, with more details to come.
3. Why Simplicity Matters (and Why it’s so Difficult to Achieve) — BJ Fogg
   Fogg, from Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab had a brilliantly terse and vivid presentation. He managed to talk more personally about computers than anyone I’ve ever heard, reminding all present that while we shape computers more significantly they shape us. The fallout will undoubtedly allow me to rethink many of my content production, consumption, and day-to-day technological interactions.

Overall the conference was an interesting mix of seasoned web veterans and industry novices, and it was remarkably void of the latest catch phrases, AJAX, ruby, et. al. while still confidently outlining the future of mobile media and that lofty goal of “convergence.” Instead of drowning in the technical details of a new frontier however, the group collectively seemed to confidently say, “when the users want their mobile content, we’ll have it for them.”

Tomorrow I’m heading down south after work with Dennis, arm-twisting John into putting us up for the night so that on Friday we can attend WebVisions in Portland. Spending a night in a house with a kegerator I decided was immensely preferable to getting up at 5am and driving down Friday morning. (I know, I’m nuts.) I’m sure it’ll be a very fun event and a good learning experience, as there is a great line-up of speakers and I’ve yet to go to one of these web convention deals. Thanks much to the headmasters at work for putting up the fare.

Though Yahoo has done some great things both aesthetically and technically to make their homepage one of the premier portals on the web, they can’t manage to redirect http://www.news.yahoo.com to point toward http://news.yahoo.com?

Why hand out an error page when you can send a user directly toward where you obviously know they intend to go?

The competition doesn’t have a problem getting it right (http://www.news.google.com), and to be fair Yahoo does give a helpful error page that steers the user in the right direction, but why not take them where they want to go seamlessly at the server level, DNS style? C’mon Yahoo this is basic usability, how many millions are on your doorstep every day? You should be laying out the red carpet, not setting tripwires.

I’ve just finished up slapping the message boards into the new template. Now you’ve got two spanking new avenues for your hypertext communicae. Please feel free to comment with your heart-warming, witty, insightful banter on each and every new post, or take it to the boards for your deep thoughts and cathartic diatribe(s).

One note on the post comments- currently your first post is placed in queue pending my approval- after that all comments will be posted immediately for your viewing pleasure. This is just a simple trick for spam prevention.

Well here it is, the beta installment of the new site. I just got done transferring the message board database from the old webhost to the new guys and though I’m far from finished with the site I figured now was as good a time as any to roll out the red gray & blue carpet. Welcome.

A Few Details

I haven’t moved the pictures over yet so the site right now is a little barren, but they’ll be back in shape pretty soon- with many more additions. I’ve got literally gigabytes of photos I’m sifting through with the aid of iView Media Pro, which I’m currently quite infatuated with. The big decision left is whether to install and hack away at gallery, a great full-featured web photo cataloguing application, or put the nose to the grindstone and finish up the PHP and flash mini web app I’ve been cooking up myself. (Sorry, no preview.)

Where’s That Old Stuff?

I’ve got the majority of the archives up here in pretty much the same format they were before, just with a new bit of packaging. Unfortunately the permanent links to old articles are now different, but I’ve made it mostly easy to track down items by date, for instance December 2004 now lives here:

wishkoski.com/archives/2004/12/

You can also still click on the “Permanent Link” next to all the old individual posts and get an updated URI for easy and quick bookmarking.

In short I’ve got a lot of work left to do, but if you know me getting started is always the hardest part- the rest is just cream cheese.

Roger McNamee’s latest post in a series entitled “Video On The Internet” on his blog, TheNewNormal just picked up a slashdotting. I made it a few months ago for work, and though it isn’t my name and content driving the traffic it is awesome to see a site I put together get the geek’s equivalent of a front page quote in the New York Times.

It’s fun to see a project created on a simple idea and a small budget come together so well and get so much attention. Shoot, I’m smiling ear-to-ear, I can’t wait to look at the server stats.

Did I mention a site I made just got ./ed?

So I’m well on my way to synchronizing my hodge-podge of scripts and code into a real blogging CMS. Soon this site will be using WordPress, which is a fantastic content creation and management tool. I’ve chosen it for it’s ease of use, extendibility, and the complete control it offers me over the design and code of the site. I’ve also used MovableType and Expression Engine on different projects but each of those systems have their downsides that I won’t get into now. WordPress has everything I need and nothing more.

So what is the problem? What is the delay? Well now my hideous mission is to enter every single update for four years into a database. I’ve looked at ways to write to my MySQL database- create some PHP to export what I have currently in my home-built system- but I’ve decided that would take longer than actually re-entering every single posting.

I’m up to April ‘02, long way to go.