ABCnews.com televises death of Bea Arthur

Writing for the Web has its own special rules, most importantly that you must be concise. Writing headlines for the Web can be even trickier. I was a little surprised to find that ABC News televised the death of Bea Arthur. But it said so right on the screen: "Watch: Bea Arthur Dies..." Sounds kind of creepy!




Update, 4/27/2009

Amazingly, the topic of today's Alertbox by Jakob Nielsen is how hard it is to write headlines for the Web, and how the BBC excels at it:

World's Best Headlines: BBC News
Summary: Precise communication in a handful of words? The editors at BBC News achieve it every day, offering remarkable headline usability.

It's hard enough to write for the Web and meet the guidelines for concise, scannable, and objective content. It's even harder to write Web headlines, which must be: short (because people don't read much online); rich in information scent, clearly summarizing the target article; front-loaded with the most important keywords (because users often scan only the beginning of list items); understandable out of context (because headlines often appear without articles, as in search engine results); and predictable, so users know whether they'll like the full article before they click (because people don't return to sites that promise more than they deliver). For several years, I've been very impressed with BBC News headlines, both on the main BBC homepage and on its dedicated news page. Most sites routinely violate headline guidelines, but BBC editors consistently do an awesome job.

See: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/headlines-bbc.html

Maureen Dowd: Coy about Twitter

Maureen Dowd's column in The New York Times today offers a coy interview with the founders of Twitter. In a face-to-face interview, she asked Biz Stone and Evan Williams to limit their answers to 140 characters -- the same as Twitter.


They ended up breaking that limit, but not by much.


At the end of the interview, Dowd asked:

ME: I would rather be tied up to stakes in the Kalahari Desert, have honey
poured over me and red ants eat out my eyes than open a Twitter account. Is
there anything you can say to change my mind?

On a hunch, I looked Maureen Dowd up on Twitter. Guess what I found...

In the news: Miley Cyrus and Hannah Montana

The number one movie right now is Hannah Montana. I was amused when Google News listed as important people in the news Hannah Montana and the young actress who portrays her, Miley Cyrus, at the same time. She also shares Google News billing with Tiger Woods, Barack Obama, and Jesus Christ. Pretty impressive company!

A sign of desperation? Microsoft advertises on Google

A fellow named James White posted a thoughtful, detailed item about the proper ways to handle "state" on the Web: how session variables or database drops are the right way to go, and JavaSript countdowns are not.

For some reason his post fired up the Google ad machine like nothing you've ever seen. That was surprising enough, but I was astonished to see a Google Adwords ad for: Internet Explorer 8!

Is this a sign that Redmond really is losing to Mountain View? IE has been losing market share to Firefox, and more recently to Google Chrome. Is Microsoft so desperate that they have to buy eyeballs from their arch-rival? This is akin to, say, CBS buying commercial time on ABC to advertise CSI.




See: http://list.msu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0903&L=webmasters&T=0&P=2449

ChcagoTribune.com shows how national can capture local

One of the ironies of this age of 24 hour news sources and RSS feeds is that you may read about a US Airways plane ditching on the Hudson on the online site of a newspaper in Ireland. A human or a robot at the Irish newspaper picked up the story from a traditional wire service, perhaps. So I shouldn't have been surprised to receive this news alert in my mail this morning:

Oral histories part of Lansing's 150th birthday 

Chicago Tribune - United States

Michigan State University's American Studies program is preparing the material for online use. The oral histories will be posted alongside transcriptions ...

Nonetheless I was surprised to see the Chicago Tribune had picked up a story about Lansing, Michigan. There is a suburb of Chicago called Lansing; you'd expect a story in the Trib to be about that Lansing. Even though the Michigan Lansing is a state capital, it usually receives about as much national coverage as, say, that other famous capital, Pierre, South Dakota.

So I followed some links at the Tribune site and discovered something very interesting.  They're not just randomly picking up major stories off the wires and publishing them at chicagotribune.com; they also seem to be publishing stories from or about many burgs across the land.

To test this theory, I searched the Trib site for "Sacramento" and found this:

Section 1) contains ads relevant to Sacramento, California.  Section 2) offers links to related topics about Sacramento.  Section 3) presents news stories about Sacramento.

Could this really be true?  Could the Chicago Tribune really publish this much stuff about faraway Sacramento on a random Sunday in March?

The answer is no. The Chicago Tribune isn't publishing all things Sacramento -- not in its print edition. Instead, they are using robots and wire services to concoct  online "local" pseudo-sections for places all around the country.

Poking around a bit further, I found confirmation of this theory:

Item 1) makes it explicit:  

Highlights

A collection of news and information related to Sacramento published by Tribune Company sources.

Item 2) shows an actual, relevant news story -- ironically about the financial struggles of the Sacramento Bee, in trouble just as the Tribune Company is.

Item 3) shows how a newsbot can fail; it's a completely irrelevant Chicago "Local News" column by Trib columnist Paul Carpenter, whose most recent column casually mentions Sacramento.

Despite that robotic failure, I think what the Tribune is doing is incredibly clever. They're leveraging the news sources they own and subscribe to in order to appear to have a presence in perhaps hundreds of local news markets.  People who use news alerts about their home town, or who search Yahoo News or Google News about their locality, may find Tribune-published stories -- perhaps before they find coverage in their own local news sources.  The Tribune "section" on their home town also serves ads for businesses local to that town.

Back in the early days of the Web, circa 1994,  the Raleigh News and Observer embarked upon a bold, even audacious, experiment -- to transform their local North Carolina paper into a national online newspaper, the NandO Times.  I interviewed them for the cable TV show my friend Chuck Severance and I hosted.  The NandO folks had a crew of about 5 or 6 people who sifted through wire services and created a national newspaper from their nook in Raleigh.

Within a couple of years, McClathy bought the News and Observer and shut down NandO.  Now, 15 years later, a much larger regional paper, itself part of a major news media company, uses robots to do a different trick: to appear to be a local news source for communities throughout the land.

I always want clever folks to succeed, but there is a huge risk: if the Tribune succeeds at this,  they could kill local news sources. The Lansing State Journal is a shell of its former self; it's shrunk so much it's almost a tabloid, and it relies on ... wire services for many local stories.  If the Chicago Tribune does a better job of packaging Lansing-related wire stories, it could speed the death of the only local daily.

Planets are using CCD cameras to spy on us?

Yup, I always suspected this.  Small planets are using CCD cameras to spy on us. NASA's Kepler mission will strive to find these planets.  We've got to locate these evil planets, and deal with this threat.

Today's Google News identifies a new celebrity: Mac Pro

Google News offers a section called "In the News" which tries to capture people who are prominently, well, in the news.  The Google newsbot obviously uses an algorithm to ferret out propoer nouns in recent news articles.  And it's obvious the algorithm thinks it's a person if it sees lots of references of two words with capital letters:  Rush Limbaugh, Barack Obama, Britney Spears -- and their pal, Mac Pro.

This morning Google News featured two new celebrities: Mac Pro and Mac Mini.  These two guys named Mac are of course two models of the Mac lineup; in the last couple days Apple announced new versions of these computers.  (Click for full-size image.)

At one point, Google News had these two guys -- Mac Pro and Mac Mini -- In the News.  Alas, poor Mr. Mini dropped off their radar, but his cousin Mac Pro remained.  As did his buddy, Late Night.

Google Earth outs our horrible lawn circa 2005

Coverage of the airplane tragedy near Buffalo NY included imagery from Google Earth and from the street view of Google Maps, making me wonder if they had discernible views of my own house. So I checked and found a satellite view of my house on Google Earth.  

When I zoomed in, I had to laugh.  The satellite image of my neighborhood showed a verdant area -- except for my own lawn. We installed a sprinkler system a couple of years after the image that Google shows, taken in 2005. 

Look closely, and you'll see that all of our neighbors obviously watered their lawns regularly.  Our lawn, by contrast, is brown.

I suppose we could claim that we were the green household in the neighborhood, not wasting precious water on living up to golf course standards.  Does this mean that brown can be green? In any event, Google Earth lays bare the story of our barren lawn.

Google News makes news out of Windows 7 non-story

Google News reports prominently that a university isn't supporting Windows 7. The headline screams Windows 7 Beta Flunks Out Of Georgetown.

This of course is not news. No IT organization supports beta software; they can't, because the definition of a beta product is that the vendor itself doesn't support it. Windows 7 is the next version of Microsoft Windows, an attempt to patch the many design flaws in Vista. It's available to the masses as a beta download. The university's IT department is merely warning the campus not to use an unsupported product.

Yet the Google News robot not only snared this non-story, it placed it above the fold, adjacent to news about world security, the global financial crisis, and the fool Blagojevich.

Ascribe original blame to Information Week -- but understand that IW is a tech industry publication whose readers will put the story in proper context. It's a problem when Google News yanks a headline from a speialty publication and republishes it for a general audience.

Jobs working less than 40 hours

Interesting juxtaposition of headlines in Google News just now.... Yesterday's inaugural address mentioned people who are voluntarily working less than full time jobs so that colleagues can stay employed; meanwhile, compensation experts are taking Steve Jobs to task for standing for re-election to Disney's board. They argue that if he can't work full time for Apple, he can't fulfill his duty as a director.

Click for full-size image.

The unnoticed Presidential transition

Newsmap makes Google News a lovely headline cloud

After 9/11 Google turned its home page into a sort of a portal with information about the disaster, how to donate relief, etc. I chronicled the evolution of their home page in an article for First Monday in October 2001, The Effects of September 11 on the Leading Search Engine. I predicted that Google would get into the news business, but they'd do it with robotic crawlers and indexers, not human editors.

Sure enough, in April 2002, Google News was released in beta. And sure enough it chose categories and headlines based on robotic algorithms. Most of the time the robot does remarkably well, but sometimes it makes some pretty funny gaffes.

Since that time the Google News interface and presentation have changed very little. For instance:















Now comes a critter called Newsmap, which transforms us from the boring text-only Google News to a cloud map of stories with headlines in proportion to apparent importance of each story. Check it out (click the image to see it full size):














A very cool graphical view. Wonder if Google will send a cease-and-desist letter, or hire the clever folks who devised this clever presentation?

Take a quick peek in case Googleshysters make it go away: http://marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm