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Moments of clarity at Connections
Issue 23 of The Sensible Internet Design Newsletter follows.
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Moments of clarity at Connections
The talk wasn't
all revenue ... and even the revenue talk was more upbeat ... but
the big newspaper/new media confab was
definitely more than a mouse in the land of Mickey.
Things seen, heard or felt at the Newspaper Association of
America's just-finished Connections conference
that made me feel better about the online news business and the
role of design in it:
More people
NAA officials reported attendance at Connections in Orlando
was up some 40 percent over last
year's conference (actually just six months ago -- the schedule was
shifted for 2003) in Denver. Mind you,
we're still talking about 300 or so people, nowhere near the
heyday of this show or Editor & Publisher
Interactive Newspapers. In the late 1990s, both trade shows could
count on two, three, even four times that
many paid attendees.
Still, online news people are crawling out of their dot-bomb
caves. It helped, I
think, to marry Connections to the NAA marketing conference and
allow people to cross-attend sessions.
Design talk is welcome again
It was good enough news that Connections included a design/
user
experience session at all this year. Design isn't always on the
agenda at the big online-news trade
shows.
But it was even better to be asked to join the panel discussion,
along with two people I
hadn't met face-to-face but wanted to: Adrian Holovaty and
Matt Stanton. We spread a little design
gospel and critiqued a couple of volunteer sites. Stanton gathered
all our presentations and examples from
the panel into an easy
one-page index you might want to check out.
Less hand-wringing about revenue
Connections
nicely balanced sessions about content with revenue-oriented
ones. In my job at Belo Interactive, I focus on
news and operations, but that operations part necessarily overlaps
some aspects of the money side. So I like
to keep up with sales and marketing trends (hey, they're also
handy for design projects).
The trend this year was more people standing up and
describing online sales opportunities that start to sound like real
money.
This morning, for example, I attended a session on the value of
required user
registration. For a moment, the standing-room-only crowd sounded
like Magic Kingdom patrons watching a
Disney fireworks show. Wes Jackson, who leads the sales
organization for that very same Belo Interactive,
had just showed the amazing open and click rates possible on e-
mail advertising messages sent to targeted
opt-in lists. Then he showed super-high cost-per-thousand ratios
on the most customized targeting. The
"oohs" and "aahs" were downright
capitalist.
More power to 'em -- I say this
free, lightweight relationship we establish with Web patrons is one
key to turning content sites into
self-sustaining businesses. It's not spam and it's not an invasion of
privacy, just a momentary
inconvenience bartered for access to quality content.
So what's the designer's role in registration? It's simple, on the
surface: organize flow and function of registration forms
immaculately, test them for usability before and after launch, and
pitch in to design meaningful management reporting tools.
Good Weblog deployments
I've expressed my opinions aplenty about Weblogs, from what
makes a
TSIDL&issueID=8">good blog architecture
to what makes
blog hype so miserable. At a Connections panel on the
expansion of the Weblog
genre, the speakers had some great ideas to advance the
concept.
David Reed, who runs the Web site
for The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, described how the paper
puts a different sports writer every week in
the arena at University of Arizona basketball games -- just to
game. Reed's team put an Apple AirPort base
station (a wireless router) in the arena, so the reporter could roam
around and submit items from anywhere
in the building.
The NCAA and Pac 10 Conference, of course, have rules
about this sort of thing,
written so Web sites won't steal the thunder of lucrative television
and radio broadcasts. So the Star
writers are limited to blogging up until seven minutes before game
time, then at halftime, then again
starting seven minutes after the final horn.
"We're telling the blog readers to watch the game
on TV, then send questions to our reporter," Reed said. "We'll
answer two or three every
halftime."
What a great Weblog implementation! This is the right
combination of known
subject-matter expert (sports writer), topic of high interest (big-time
local university basketball),
modestly priced technology (a laptop and consumer wireless
router) and grassroots interactivity. Eliza Wing,
the Cleveland.com boss who
was session moderator, added a great point:
when you take this idea down to the level of high school sports,
you lose all those licensing issues and
have even more flexibility to blog.
It's just a smart idea. We'll take all we can get, right?
Both blogs