Tag Archives: web

Content in an Online World: A Modest Proposal

06 Tuesday Jan 2015

Posted by in Opinion, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , ,

1625.prd.s.alt.002
This pic will make sense later, I promise

When I went to New Zealand at the age of 27, some of the things it taught me were about the United States.  For example, at that time Baywatch and Pam Anderson were hugely, wildly popular, and a question my friend Tim and I often heard, especially when people learned we were from California, was:  Is that what it’s really like?  (“Only in Venice,” I said to one.)  Another thing I learned was the sheer variety of food we had available in California.  At a small grocery store near Christchurch–a decent-sized city–they had two sets of lunch meat.  Not three types of meat; three sets, period.  You could have ham, or beef.  By manufacturer X.  That was it; your choices.  You didn’t get to decide between grain-fed beef or free-range turkey or whatever; this packet of ham, or that packet of beef.  Thanks for shopping!

But the other big thing I noticed about America while I was in New Zealand was . . . standarization.  We’re big into standards here.  Not quality standards; design standards.  Not to gross you out, but the place I noticed it most was in plumbing fixtures, specifically urinals.  Here, urinals either look like vertical (when they’re individual) or horizontal (like in older sports stadiums) bathtubs.  All of them, everywhere.  You go into a men’s room in Omaha and it’ll have a urinal that looks just like the one in your office park in Mt. View.  Oh, there’ll be a bit of variety; here there are self-flushing ones, there you have to use a handle and flush manually.  But in the main, standards.  Hell, there’s a company that makes this stuff called, naturally enough, “American Standard“.  We like to standardize.

So you’d think (he said, finally getting to the point) that after 20 or so years, Web pages would be pretty standardized by now.  That at least there’d be some agreements on some basic things, like putting an author’s name and email address on there, or some such.  But if you think that, you’d be out of luck.  And so, in an effort to correct this rather egregious error, I offer to you a very, very short list of simple things everyone can do to their web sites to make life much better for everyone.  So pay attention!  I’ve been writing online content for longer than the web has existed, and I actually know what I’m talking about here!

Every web page, everywhere, should have a date stamp.  You’d think this goes without saying, but apparently it doesn’t because a lot of otherwise fine sites don’t follow this rule.  Why is it important?  Because in an online world, you can’t always tell by looking how old a post is.  You’re reading a post that you got to through google and thinking, “Wait, there’s a chance of a government shutdown?”, and then do a little digging and find that you’re reading a post from 2009 or something.  Why make readers guess?  Put the date stamp right up there at the top.

Another important ease-of-use issue is:  Don’t make readers click through dozens of pages.  Yes, I know it ups your click counts; yes, I know you can squeeze in more advertisers that way; yes, I know you can sucker readers into accidentally clicking on ad links that are made to look like a “Next page ->” link.  And you know what?  That’s a good long-term strategy for driving away readers.  I once clicked on a link that was The Top 100 [something]–I can’t remember what–and they were all on their own separate page.  Does the writer, or more likely the editor or site owner, really think anyone is going to click through that many pages?  It’s absurd.  I got out of there in a hurry.  I wonder how many hits they got on page 100; close to zero, I’m guessing.

If you feel you must have click throughs, at least give your readers the option of reading it as a single page.  Yes, it’s more work for you–which is why I urge you to make your content a single page to begin with!–but it will make your readers happy.  Buzzfeed has plenty of long lists, and they don’t force you to go to multiple pages and they’re doing pretty durn good.

And speaking of multiple pages, for the love of God, don’t force open a whole bunch of new pages or tabs when they’re all associated with your site.  I went to pay my daughter’s tuition and opened up the main college site.  This told me to go to the student site which, when I clicked, opened a new tap in my browser.  Then when I logged in and click the “payment plan” button, it opened up yet another new tab; I now had three separate tabs open when all I wanted was to pay the durn bill.  Bad design, ACC.  And again, if you feel you must open new tabs or pages, let your readers choose at least.

Another feature I think should be avoided is forcing people to “sign up” with your site in order to leave comments.  I’ve gone to [random site] following a link from Twitter or Facebook, left a comment, and then had the site ask for my name and email address at a minimum, or access to my Twitter, Facebook, or whatever account.  First, stop calling the name field “name”; call it “handle” or “alias” or something so that people know they don’t have to use their real names.  But even better would be to stop doing it altogether.  I don’t mind my regular sites having that information, but the Atlanta Constitution-Journal or whatever just because I went there that one time?  Silly.

Related to that is the obnoxious “opt out” practice.  Most sites that use your email are at least polite enough to inform you and give you a “please don’t spam me” checkbox (sometimes checked by default, sometimes not–another tip:  Let it always be unchecked by default!).  But there are clearly plenty that just grab your email address and start sending you spam, which you then have to opt out of by clicking a link to an “opt out” page.  Don’t do that to your readers.  And if you have an “opt out” page or pages, don’t force them to answer why they’re opting out; the answer is simple: They’re tired of spam from you!  There, I’ve told you; stop asking!

In a similar, and much more obnoxious, vein is the pop-up (or whatever the hell they’re calling it now).  Again, it’s an issue of revenue, I’m sure, but two things to avoid: Don’t let it cover the entire page, and have a big, clear, easy-to-find, easy-to-tap “X” in either the upper-right or upper-left corner.  That’s where years of Mac or PC use have taught us to look to close stuff.  Making the pop-up cover the whole page; having it stay there for a pre-allotted time before you can close it; making it a video that plays automatically; giving it an audio track that plays automatically; making it look like you can close it but really it takes you to another page; all these are douche moves.  Don’t do them.

Finally–and I know this will be controversial for some–include the author on each piece.  On technical documents on corporate sites this isn’t a real need; on opinion pieces, it really is.  And if you don’t want to use your real name–and I know plenty who not only don’t, but legally can’t–use your nome de plume or alias or handle or whatever you write behind, and then include a link to where people can voice their opinions other than the comments page.  I think a link to folks’ Twitter accounts is good, but maybe just set up an email account–I’ve got five (I think)–where people can send stuff.  Will most of it be dreck?  Of course.  But one of the benefits of online content is that it makes people feel there are less layers between you and the writer.  When I read a Matt Taibbi piece to which I take issue, I don’t comment after the post or send mail to Rolling Stone, I tell Taibbi on his Twitter feed.  Maybe he doesn’t respond, but it feels as if he might.  And improving people’s feelz when it comes to online content is what we’re talking about here.

Anyway, those are a few of the things I’ve noticed in my time online, and think we should strive to standardize against.  What about you?

Information Isn’t Power

28 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by in Opinion, Uncategorized

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

BmUSt7rCUAA6ueO.jpg-large
Illustration by David Somerville based on the original by Hugh McLeod

I read a pretty broad swath of stuff, from my son’s car magazines to high tech blogs to marketing web sites.  My job is weird, and (apparently) my thirst for input is pretty promiscuous.  Thus it was that I was reading a post by the aforementioned Mr. Somerville on the Brain on Digital site.  And there, right up front, the very first sentence grabbed my attention:

They used to say knowledge is power, but now there’s Google — information is everywhere, and cheap.

Now, don’t get the wrong idea here; Somerville’s post is about how in the ocean of data that washes over us every day, the most important commodity is attention.  How can you catch someone’s eye when you know that they’re flooded by information?  How can you get someone (to stick to our water analogy) to pay attention to a particular drop of water when they’re swimming in the middle of a data equivalent of the Mississippi river?  It’s well worth reading.

But it was that first sentence that got me thinking, because I’m sure that there is a big difference between information, and knowledge.  That old chestnut states “Knowledge is power”; not data, or information, but knowledge.  I’m not being pedantic here; in a world where we almost literally have an incredible amount of data (some of it highly dubious) at our fingertips, it’s how we collate, integrate, and apply that information that gives you knowledge.  And, as Somerville shows, hopefully eventually wisdom.

When I was a kid, what I wanted more than anything was eidetic memory, i.e. “photographic memory”.  I had an unusually good memory, but it was frustratingly imperfect and I wanted it perfect.  I wanted to remember everything.  I knew that a lot of folks with eidetic memory had some fairly severe neurological or psychological issues, but I was Doug; I wouldn’t have that problem, right?  The perfect arrogance of a child.

In the years since, I’ve learned that there’s a reason eidetic memory is both rare, and often associated with disorders; how the heck do you catalog and store all that data?  How can your brain keep up?  Memory is associative; that is, when you create a new memory, it associates with other memories in your brain and forms new connections.  It’s not a straight linear progression of adding raw data; your brain is always taking that data and doing shit with it.  “That reminds me of . . .”  The more memories, the more associations.  So most people’s brains flush some stuff, just to make room.  People with eidetic memories are awash in memories, flooded by data.  No wonder they struggle!  Do you really want to remember, say, what it smelled like that day you had the flu in 1987?  Or how your skin felt when you burned yourself on the stove that time in December, 1992?  What if you couldn’t forget that?

The Internet is our cultural eidetic memory; it stores everything.  We apply associations by hand with links, but the Internet doesn’t self-associate.  Adding new data and linking it to other data doesn’t create real associations like we do with our brains; they’re just static links.  They’re something some random person at some point thought was related to the topic at hand.  Useful, but not the same thing.

So now we all have access to eidetic memory, but does all that data make us all equally “powerful” in the “knowledge is power” sense?  Clearly not.  You have to tag, order, sort, and organize that information in some way.  Then you have to create connection between pieces of data that maybe other folks don’t see.  “Huh; you know, that makes me think of what this book by Dr. Blaupunkt said on a related topic . . .”  And with those connections, you come up with ideas and thoughts that maybe didn’t exist before.  And that is power.

People in fiction often use the “knowledge is power” formulation to demonstrate that when a state or other entity withholds information, withholds data, the people are ignorant and the folks holding that information have the power.  And that’s true, of course, but why?  Because without that data, people can’t collate the information, form those associations, and come up with their own ideas and thoughts.  If you don’t know the multiplication tables, you can’t do fractions.  But if you do know those multiplication tables, you can move on to division, and fractions, and algebra, and geometry, and on into Calculus and the next thing you know you’ve got Newton’s Laws of Motion and nuclear power and iPhones and whatnot.  But it’s not just the raw data; it’s the insight to see connections between those data points that other people haven’t seen yet.  And it builds on itself; new ideas create new data, which allows people to have new insights and create new data, and so on ad infinitum.

And it’s not just having access to the data and making connections, either; finding the information is more difficult than people imply when they say “Just Google it”.  Google is all well and good, but if you’re using the wrong search terms, you’re not going to find what you’re looking for no matter how many times you click the Search button.  You have to imply a certain amount of insight and use some guesswork (“I wonder what most people would call that?”) to get what you’re looking for.  Google can’t do that thinking for you.

While not a great movie (and I personally don’t like Bradley Cooper), “Limitless” explored this in a very interesting way.  Our Hero, Eddie, is a smart but unmotivated fiction writer.  He takes a drug, and suddenly he’s brilliant.  But not because he’s suddenly taking in a huge new ocean of data; no, it’s because he can make connections between data that was already there in his noggin, and create new ideas and new conclusions from it.  Such is also the brilliance of Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Spock, Herocule Poirot, and many other “genius” fictional characters.  It’s not the data, folks, it’s the connections and conclusions and deductions.

So fear not:  Even though the Internet and the Web and Google and WikiPedia level the data playing field, that ability to create those connections, and from them original ideas, is still the thing that counts.  Data isn’t power; knowledge is power, and knowledge comes from those insights and connections.

That’s what I think, anyway.  But maybe I need some more data.

A Brief Treatise on Trolls

29 Saturday Mar 2014

Posted by in News, Opinion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

internet-troll1
photo courtesy of BeWytch Me

I’ve been online since, believe it or not, 1982.  Yes, the Internet existed then, but it was tiny, and primarily limited to universities and military or government installations.  And as luck would have it, my career in high tech has almost completely coincided with the exponential expansion of the Internet, the birth and explosive growth of the Web, and the penetration of computers into basically every home and practically every pocket.  So I have a little bit of perspective of things of an online nature.  I’m not an expert by any means; I haven’t studied it.  But I do have more than 30 years of experience in it.  For whatever that is worth.

I mention this to provide a little context for my observations about trolls.  I was thinking about this recently after reading an interesting article in Slate that cited a scientific study of trolls and trolling.  The gist is, bluntly, exactly what Slate’s title notes:  Trolls are awful people.  I had always wondered what kind of personality got actual pleasure from pissing off complete strangers, starting online fights (and then leaving them), creating havoc, and engaging in this kind of anti-social behavior.  Your assumption is that they are dicks.  And now the evidence is in, and it tells us:  Yup, they’re utter douche-bags.

And here’s the thing: They’ve always been around.  Even when I was on a university forum (text-only, limited to students and faculty), people would troll just to be obnoxious jerks.  And about the same thing that people troll about now:  Abortion, homosexuality, politics, sexism, racism, and the like.  The same damn things.  The only big difference now seems to be that more people have access, so there are more trolls.  But they’re still jumping in their with their homophobic polemics or whatever to stir people up.  It’s predictable.

And because it’s predictable, in my standard bury-the-lede style, I thought I’d outline a few common behaviors over the years to help you spot trolls sooner, and so maybe avoid some personal aggravation.  Also, I’m procrastinating on working on my novel.

  • First and foremost, trolls are bullies.  They’re not online to debate; they’re online to piss people off.  If you see someone bullying over and over, they’re probably a troll.  Do not engage.
  • They employ name-calling, often of the most juvenile sort.  I’ve lost track of the number of trolls who have called me “Moron” (sometimes with the capital “M”, sometimes not), an insult that was a tired trope in, literally, my grandfather’s day.
  • In the same vein, trolls often resort to simple, ad hominem attacks, often out of the blue.  If you push them, they won’t engage, they’ll attack.  Usually by calling you stupid, a “libtard”, an idiot, or some other juvenile epithet.
  • Some trolls like to employ ALL CAPS.  And they do this because they know that it pisses people off (see how this is a recurring theme?), and that people will respond to it.  Think of the two year-old mentality of your toddler pushing their zippy cup off their high chair just to watch you pick it up; that’s how they like to use all-caps.
  • When bullying, name calling, ad hominem attacks, and all-caps fail, trolls often switch the subject, what I call the “shiny object” method.  Say you are arguing about a particular behavior patter of Republicans.  A troll will sail in and start talking about Democrats that “do the same thing”, or start chattering about Benghazi, or some perceived right-wing slight from 10 years ago.  Anything so long as it’s a shiny enough object to distract attention away from the main point, which is that they don’t have any argument worthy of the name and are just trying to piss you off.
  • And of course it almost goes without saying that these creatures never, ever, ever acknowledge mistakes or apologize.
  • A quick and easy method to recognize trolls is:  Did this user (and they always hide behind aliases) just join up in the last few days, or even hours?  It doesn’t matter if this is just a new alias for a pre-existing troll; if they’ve just joined up, and all 12 of their posts are berating “libtards” or “socialists” or something, they’re almost certainly a troll.
  • Does this person tend to post their inflammatory B.S. and then vanish, with no follow-ups or attempts to engage?  Classic trollism.
  • And finally, your more clever troll will appear to engage you, but in reality they’re laying rhetorical traps to try to catch you so they can scream “Ah Ha!  Hypocrite!” and pretend that they win the discussion.  This type is rarer, because it takes some intellect, and most trolls in my experience don’t have all 52 cards in their mental deck.  But you do run across them at times.

So there you have it.  You see these behaviors, you have yourself a troll, and you shouldn’t bother responding to them because–to repeat–all they want to do is piss you off.  If they succeed, they’re happy.  If you ignore them, that makes them mad.  I know which option I prefer; how about you?

Service in the Information Age

22 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by in Opinion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

Service-Pro
Image courtesy of the Connecticut Real Estate Blog

Back in the day, if you needed a plumber or electrician or carpenter or whatever to work on your house, you plowed through the Yellow Pages (ask your grandparents), looked at the various ads, and tried to decide which one sounded the most likely to be competent and reasonably-priced.  Or you asked a friend or (if they lived nearby) a relative.  Basically, it was a roll of the dice.  And if you got a stinker, you told your friends and relatives so that they wouldn’t hire him or her, and you tried someone else next time.  Inefficient and kind of ridiculous, but this was the Mesozoic age as far as information flow was concerned, and we did the best we could.

One advantage of this for providers (as we call ’em nowadays) is that word was slow to get out; if you sucked at your job, you still had a reasonable chance of obtaining enough work to live on, staying ahead of people’s accusations of ineptitude, as it were.

How quaint.

Now of course we have almost the opposite problem:  There is so much information about a given service provider that the tough thing is to filter it out.  When you go on Yelp for example and search on “Austin best plumber”, you get 8 hits just for the “downtown” area.  Eight?  They can’t all be the best, right?  So you start plowing through the reviews and, if you are an compulsive review reader such as myself, you’ll notice something:  Everyone seems to provide either 5-star or 1-star reviews.  To put it in math terms, the standard deviation is huge.  (To put it in Tom Lehrer terms, “You can get a standing ovations for pretty much anything in this country”.)  I’ll talk about how to filter in a future post–I think it’s an interesting topic, but then I’m a nerd–but the gist for today is:  How does the provider respond?

Look for some service on Yelp–doesn’t matter what.  Then just filter the results from “worst to best” ratings.  Then take a look; does the provider respond?  How does he or she respond?  Is it some kind of canned response, very generic, the kind of thing you expect to get if you complain to a big corporation or your Senator or something?  Or is it personal, well-written, to the point, and does it directly address the complaint?  I can’t under-state how much data this gives you; if the provider ignores bad reviews, or is rude in response, or only posts canned responses, that tells you a lot, don’t you think?  But on the other hand if he responds, is friendly and courteous, and provides reasonable explanations for the customer’s bad experience . . . well, that’s a lot of quality information for you.

And this is the only way I think a service provider stand out can stand out these days:  By providing good service for the money, yes, but also by providing quality customer service.  This is much more than just being polite to nasty trolls on Yelp; you have to be response and respectful to your customers in every forum.  Is your voice-mail polite, helpful, and friendly?  Do you answer phone messages within a reasonable amount of time?  Do you work with potential customers to provide them service at their convenience?  Are you responsive to complaints?  Do you charge a reasonable price, and do you make your fees clear at the beginning of the job?  All little things by themselves, but combined with vast amount of data available on line, this is the kind of thing that makes a difference.

I’m a tech writer in a marketing organization right now.  This is an odd place for a tech writer to be; we’re usually in engineering.  But one thing I’ve learned is that the marketing trope “we’re all marketing people” (i.e., we all need to sell our product to our customers, and thus constantly be thinking about that during every interaction) is especially true for independent service providers.  You may think this is trite, but think about it:  If a plumber or electrician or landscaper or whoever comes to your house and is surly, irritating, and difficult to work with, are you going to want them back?  If they are instead helpful and friendly, aren’t you going to sing their praises not only to your friends, but also on Yelp or wherever?  I think the answer is obvious.

This is the brave new world of online Big Data; the only way to stand out is via superior customer service.  That is your market differentiator.  Do with it as you will.

How Google and Searching Twists Web Sites

12 Tuesday Nov 2013

Posted by in News, Opinion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

google-penguin-2
The Google Penguin tyrant (image courtesy of MediaWhiz)

Not all that long ago, I was a contributor to the (in my view excellent) tech news, opinion, and review web site Gear Diary.  Gear Diary posts news items (selected from a flood of inbound email of companies wanting more press), reviews of software and tech gear, and opinion pieces related to the tech world.  For several years, I was one of the primary writers of the news posts–I would take the copy that the various companies sent us, quote a bit of their press release info about the product, provide my own spin on it, tell folks where they could read more about it, and that was it.

A while back, we discovered that the site was being relegated to “scraper” status.  If you’re not familiar with the terminology, a “scraper” site is a site that basically just reprints news posts that they’ve “scraped” from other sites whole-hog in an attempt to generate high “click-through” numbers, allowing them to get advertisers and so make money.  It’s a repulsive practice, in my opinion; it’s not all that different from sending out junk mail or spam.  And it appalled us that we were being so labeled; we worked very hard on the site, and to be put down there with the Nigerian spammers was grating, to say the least.

It turns out that Google has certain requirements in their “Google Penguin” algorithm that you have to meet in order to both not be labeled a “scraper”, and to get hits.  And so we spent a lot of time changing our templates and reworking posts to meet these requirements.  You couldn’t quote press release info that might appear elsewhere; you had to make sure the post was 250 words or more; the title bar and the first sentence of the post had to contain the right keywords; etc. etc.  It was, to put it mildly, obnoxious.  This is the world Google and their search algorithms have forced us into.

I was thinking about this just recently while reading a piece on one of my favorite news and opinion sites, Salon.  I’ve been reading Salon almost since they started, back in the mid-90s–the dawn of the Web era.  They’re a left-leaning news and entertainment site that has hosted many, many interesting writers, from Anne Lamott to Joan Walsh to Heather Havrilsky to Glenn Greenwald and many more.  But like all Web magazines these days, they have to please their advertisers, and that means they have to get click throughs.  And it seems, more and more, that the way Salon does this is by including a picture and subtitle to a post that they know their audience will click on.

Keep in mind this audience:  Liberals and progressives.  How do you get folks like that to click on something?  What kinds of pictures might interest them?  They use Grover Norquist and Sarah Palin a lot, as you might imagine.  Which is fine I suppose, unless those worthies aren’t even mentioned in the articles at which their pictures appear atop.  And that seems to be happening on Salon more and more lately.

Today I clicked on the link to a story entitled, “Sound, fury, cliche! Lazy pundits “double down” on “game changing” “narratives”“, with a subtitle of “Jon Stewart was right: From Fox News to NPR, pundits hurt the political debate by speaking in the same lazy cliches.”

And Stewart, The Daily Show, and other “fake news” commentators like Stephen Colbert weren’t even mentioned in the post.

I realize that the idea of the photos and subtitles that accompany posts have one goal in mind:  To maximize views.  I also realize that the folks who create the headlines, subtitles, and choose the photos that go with the posts are not the same as the authors of said posts.  I understand that.

Even so, the disconnect between those two in recent months at Salon has gotten absurd.  Any time there is an anti-government, anti-tax post, Grover Norquist appears in the photo, despite the fact that the vast majority of the time, Mr. Norquist makes no appearance in the post itself.  There are many, many similar examples.  And here we have an interesting post–far, far, far too long-winded and repetitive, in my view, but that is a point folks can argue–that has a picture of Jon Stewart at the top and mentions him in the subtitle, but not Stewart, The Daily Show, or his style of “reporting” are mention or even alluded to.

And that’s simply not okay.  I clicked on a post to see what impact Stewart, The Daily Show, or the (still very small) industry of “fake news reporting”–which includes Stewart, Stephen Colbert, the folks at the SNL Weekend Update team, The Onion, Funny or Die, and a few other places–has on news reporting and our public discourse, not a lengthy treatise on why and how the bloviators of the Beltway and mainstream media fake being “objective”, and give voice to their opinions while simultaneously distancing themselves from those same opinions.  An interesting topic, I agree, but not what I was clicking on to read about.

This has gone beyond the realm of click-bait and into that of false advertising.  It’s become ridiculous.  Salon is deliberately misleading its readers in an effort to get them to click on posts.  And it runs back to Google, their search algorithms, advertising, and the dynamics of the web.

I don’t have a quick or easy solution, alas; I just know that we seem to be going down a bad path, dictated by the all-powerful Penguin, and we need to rethink it.  And Google needs to get back to their “Do no evil” mantra.