Gannett Rolling Out New Design for Local News Sites
A friend of mine works for Gannett, which owns USA Today and heaps of local newspapers and TV stations throughout the country. Well, most of the local sites are horrible at the very least. However, the company is in the process of rolling out new designs across their network.
The Desert Sun site from Palm Springs, California is one of the first sites to get the facelift:
Compare it to the site of its sister publication The Californian — which will likely get its new design soon — from Salinas, California:
I’m not going to do a site review, but can you tell the difference?
Link Roundup (July 30, 2007)
Get productive with the best Facebook Apps
Lifehacker breaks down Facebook Apps that can improve productivity.
A Social-Networking Service With a Velvet Rope
New York Times on Digg/Revision3/Pownce founder Kevin Rose. If anyone wants a Pownce invite, let me know in the comments. I’ve got a few left.
coComment to Launch New Version Tomorrow
A new version of this comment tracking service will go live tomorrow. You can check out the beta below:
http://beta.cocomment.com/
u: betatester
p: cocommentv2
Joel on Software post explaining why he and Dave Winer don’t allow comments on their blogs. If I was a big-shot blogger like Winer or Joel, I could see how comments could get in the way. But as a writer for a specialized, modestly read blog, I’m happy to receive comments at all and think they add value to the posts instead of taking value away.
9 Ways to Build Your Own Social Network
Techcrunch breaks down options for building a social networking component into your website.
Ask Bill Richardson a question via his site
It seems that Bill Richardson's Presidential Campaign had a great time at the CNN/YouTube Debate on Monday that they added a new feature to their site. If you go to the "Ask Bill" page, you can fill out a form with your personal information and a link to the a video question that you have for the Governor.
He states on the page, "I wish I could get to every living room and meeting hall in this country to talk to people, shake hands, and answer questions face-to-face. I can't do that, but I can do the next best thing."
I'm wondering if candidates answering Internet video questions is just a fad, but this is a sign that the presidential campaigns are taking those questions seriously.
Craigslist vs. Ebay
I am a big fan of buying and selling items online. I think using sites like Craigslist and eBay provide efficient and easy ways to find cheap and useful items and also for getting rid of unwanted stuff (for a profit!). My most recent purchase was a 3 person tent in great condition for just $10 on Craigslist. What a deal.
This begs the question though, which service is better? Craigslist or eBay? This question becomes more and more important as we discuss the future of classified ads in relation to newspapers and media. How will the progression of these websites compete not only with MSM classifieds, but also with each other?
Newspaper Homepages and Load Times
Our recent newspaper study dealt exclusively with the features present on newspaper websites. We didn’t look critically at the design of these sites. The adoption of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) makes it possible for web developers to create rich designs while keeping the file size of pages to a minimum.
In looking at newspaper websites, it becomes clear pretty quickly that their homepages are bloated. They try to stick as much data as possible on the homepage (including ads).
Given that, we decided to look at the file sizes of the homepages of the top 10 newspapers, and how much of that file size is devoted to advertising. Note that file size does not always equate to load times. Other factors such as the number of database calls and the quality of the hosting environment play big roles.
These numbers were grabbed using the Firebug Firefox extension. Sizes were recorded both with Adblock on and off, so we can get an idea of how much space is devoted to advertising. Continue reading “Newspaper Homepages and Load Times” »