Steve Rubel over at Micro Persuasion has the news that ESPN.com is now allowing readers to comment on every single story posted on their website, including wire stories.  Here is a controversial story about Tim Hardaway that has attracted over a 1,000 comments thusfar.  ESPN also has added a nice feature where they list out the most commented on stories (see right).

A couple of points about the implementation for anyone thinking of doing something similar on their own site:

( 1) A feature that allows users to report inappropriate comments has been included.  For sites the size of ESPN it is vital that you let your users help police the comments. 

(2) The site allows you to block the comments of users you don't like.  This is important.  Moderators at community sites (particularly sports ones)  spend a disproportionate amount of their time moderating personal feuds between users and dealing with complaints about a small percentage of really obnoxious and abusive users.  This feature allows users to block the loud mouths.  Problem solved.

Overall ESPN has done a real nice job and I'm a big fan of these types of features.  However I think there is one opportunity missed here.  Currently, there is no way for users to establish a profile where they can put in their real name, email address, website URL and other information.  Adding the comments themselves is great, but I think the real value comes when you provide ways for people to connect with each other.

Part one of my review of the top presidential campaign sites starts with Hillary Clinton's (exploratory committee) site .

As I've mentioned in a past post, this site impresses me with its lack of fluff and solid design. The red, white and blue palette is toned down for a less giddy experience. The user's eye doesn't bounce around. It goes where it was intended to go: the logo to the video to the action center. It's also only as Web 2.0 as it has to be. The background and internal use of the gradient when applied judiciously is one of the appealing aspects of the 2.0 design mantra and works just fine here. No reflecting pool logos (author guilty as charged) are to be seen. The text contrast has been subdued for maximum readability. No high contrast or color/font choices to vibrate through. The Contribute button, although in stop-sign red, is placed between the Action Center and Featured Clips, halfway down the page. Not exactly screaming at users, which is a nice change of pace. You don't see it repeated in the milder universal navigation until you're already working through the site. The overall initial experience is refreshingly pleasant here and I am into the content quickly without having to click through any registrations or toil through a video or splash page. High marks.

Click on the screenshot below and then roll over the numbers on the various page elements to see comments.

We implemented a new WordPress plugin (Snap Preview) this week that uses Snap to provide visual previews of  links on mouseover.  Nothing revolutionary going on here, but it is nice plugin candy for people into that sort of thing (me). 

Screenshot below:

Go here if you want to install.

• What the Chinese Want to Know
  Interesting list of the top search terms for 2006 on the Chinese search engine Baidu. Thankfully Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears’ don’t dominate Chinese thoughts they way they do those of Americans.
• Microsoft takes email design back years
  Outlook 2007 will handle HTML emails in a vastly different manner than previous versions of the email program. If you are sending out HTML emails, you should look at this list of what is and isn’t supported and run your emails through Microsoft downloadable email validator. This is a big deal.
• The XYZ of ABC
  Blog PI wonders if and when Republican online fundraising site ABC PAC will catch up with it’s Democrat counterpart, ActBlue. Mike Turk and Patrick Ruffini also weigh in. The biggest problem here for Republicans is that two years passed before someone took the initiative and developed a response to ActBlue.
• Huffington Post to Host Presidential Debates?
  The political blog the Huffington Post is trying convince Democrat and Republican presidential candidates to participate in online debates on the site. I don’t think it will happen. Second Life is a more likely venue.

A mock up of the Google homepage done in the Yahoo! design style is making the rounds today. Steve Bryant, who put this together, did a great job on it. But let’s just say I’m of the definite opinion that Google has been smart to keep things simple.

As a designer, I’ve struggled as how to best contribute to our blog. Most web design articles speak to people who aren’t designers and tend to focus on the obvious. I don’t intend to add to that.

So I decided to attempt a redesign of the USA Today homepage as companion piece to our recommendations to the newspaper industry. Senior designer Jei Park and I sat down and figured if we’re going to talk the talk, we might as well start walking as well. A couple of notes:

(1) In putting this together, we included every element of the current USA Today site. We wanted to come up with something that could actually be implemented, not something so conceptual that it could never see the light of day. In other words, we didn’t take the easy way out.

(2) We chose USA Today because it is the most circulated paper in the country, and which has had the same design for a couple of years. The point is to show what we think these things should look like. As a designer, the last thing I’m interested in is criticizing the work of other designers. That isn’t the point here.

(3) We want to hear your thoughts. If you like it, say so. If you hate it, say so. If you have changes you’d like to see, say so. If you think we’ve missed something, say so. We intend to act on the feedback and come up with a revised version in the next few weeks that takes into account what you have to say. The goal of this is to start a conversation about what newspaper websites should look like.

The design process almost always happens behind closed doors. Let’s see what happens when we get lots of good feedback from cross section of smart people. Click here or on the image above to see the full view. You can read Todd’s explanation of the features presented here. Tell us what you think.

Virtual gaming fever has hit the MacArthur Foundation, resulting in the philanthropic organization awarding Indiana University professor Edward Castronova a $240,000 grant to build a Second Life -esque virtual world fashioned after the plays of Shakespeare. The project, entitled "Arden: The World of Shakespeare," is meant to let Castronova and his research team delve into online behaviors by conducting ongoing social experiments online.

In an article by CNET's Daniel Terdiman, the professor explains that the early designs are influenced by a "Richard III" theme, which gives designers and prospective gamers the necessary historical context needed to spark the imagination.

Castrova, an Associate Professor of Telecommunications at Indiana University, is the author of Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games and Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier, as well as the director of the Synthetic Worlds Initiative. The Synthetic Worlds Initiative was founded in 2004 to "promote research on synthetic worlds." The research center has both a website and a blog .   

With the recent news that the Iranian government has decided to limit ADSL bandwidth above 128 kbps for all ISPs (BoingBoing reported it before Reuters) without giving a reason, it makes sense that this is an opportune time to take stock of state-mandated Internet regulation (including content filtering and surveillance) schemes around the world.

We've done a post before on the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), an organization created through the collective efforts of the various Internet research centers at the University of Toronto, Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford. The main mission of this group is to examine the phenomenon of state control over the Internet (filtering and blocking content, etc.) in various countries. The center has published a number of research papers on their site that are devoted to studying the anatomy and pervasiveness of state-sponsored filtering and information-control initiatives around the world. Case studies concerning content filtering and surveillance are currently available for the following countries:

• Vietnam
• Yemen
• Tunisia
• Burma
• Singapore
• Iran
• China
• Bahrain
• United Arab Emirates
• Saudi Arabia

In addition to case studies and other interesting publications, ONI also provides an interactive map that not only illustrates the state of the Internet in various countries, but also briefs the user on the level of filtering in the country, the way filtering technology is used, the state of the media environment and examples of sites that have been either blocked or filtered. (more…)

In the wake of the purchase of YouTube by Google, there has been a lot of discussion about online video and the various companies trying to gain market share in the space.  When you look at the various players, you’ll see a lot of different approaches.  Some focus on viral video.  Some focus on sharing videos with friends and family.  Some focus on serving the needs of video bloggers.

As someone who builds websites for a living, I’ve been looking at these services the last few weeks.  What I’ve been contemplating is using these services to host videos for some of our clients. 

We’ve built custom Flash video players for a number of clients and we will continue to do so for those who want or need a custom player.  But for clients that produce four of five videos a year, why not host the video using one of these third party services? 

You save time since all the services automatically convert videos into FLV (Flash) format for you.  You save bandwidth costs by hosting through a third party.  You also get a lot of value-added features that you aren’t going to have the resources to build into a custom player yourself.

We launched a website for the Washington Area Women’s Foundation earlier this week that includes a few videos.  After looking at four or five options, I ended up hosting the videos through blip.tv.  Here’s what I like about the service and why I chose it.

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eKarjala inspired me to take the time and dig up some fossils of today's most popular websites using the Wayback Machine. Click on the images to be taken to the archived websites and the text link to see today's versions:

APPLE (December, 1998)

  (more…)

While browsing Consumerist the other day for updates on the Krempasky vs. Popken debate, I noticed that one of the posts reported that Consumer Reports has introduced a Consumer Safety Blog. I'm a big fan of consumer advocacy and think it's a great idea. However, I can't say I'm taken with the site right away.

The blog has some obvious design problems. The features on it look pretty solid, but this screenshot depicts several details which make this blog unappealing to me.

1. Posts: I can't see the title of more than one post. While the headline "Cocaine Energy Drink" does grab my attention, I'm not seeing anything else, including the one that's on dorm safety (which is actually titled "Ed Comeau: Firefighter" as though it were paying tribute to Mr. Comeau), the one about Playskool's product recall and the one on bike safety. These headlines immediately would give readers more of an idea about what the blog is about than just the one on the Cocaine Energy Drink. (more…)

This is one of those weeks where I've got more material than time.  So here are some quick thoughts on some things that have been floating around my browser this week.

(1) A new startup launched this week called Grand Central.  According to Life Hacker, Grand Central "lets you consolidate all of your phone numbers into one number, meaning someone can call you on your GrandCentral phone number and all of your phones (cell phone, work phone, home phone) will ring."  That's just sort of the starting point with this service too.  Sounds awesome.  Looking forward to giving it a try. 

(2) There is an interesting post on Forever Geek that debunks the Myspace claim to have 100 million users.  It puts the number of actual users at around 43 million.  Not sure about the methodology, but there is no doubt in my mind that that 100 million number is bogus.

(3) Saw an interesting post entitled 10 Things that will Make or Break Your Website.  Best advice comes in the first bullet: "EASY is the most important feature of any website, web app, or program."

(4) The Wall Street Journal published a fascinating article on the email overload problem that afflicts most of us.  Great read for anyone that feels like a slave to their inbox most days. 

(5) Michael Kinsley wrote a great article for Time Magazine this week called Do Newspapers Have a Future?  Money quote: "Newspapers on paper are on the way out. Whether newspaper companies are on the way out too depends."  IMO, the key to survival is figuring out how to use the Internet properly.  We'll continue to beat that particular drum. 

(6) Mark Warner got a lot of attention for appearing in Second Life a few months back.  We wrote about it.  The appearance was short and he didn't take any quesitons from the audience, saying he would come back for a full townhall in late September/early October.  Did they ever schedule this?  I haven't heard a peep about it since the initial burst of coverage.

The last year has seen the rise of social news sites that give users editorial control of the sites' homepage by voting on their favorite stories.   Users submit stories which are then voted on by other users, with the most popular stories appearing most prominently on the sites.  The key to this concept is users spending time reading through submissions to find the most compelling stories.  The three most prominent social news sites that I know of are Digg, Reddit and Netscape.   

Recently, Erin's rant about Facebook was submitted to Digg by a random Digg user.  As an experiment (and in an effort to promote Erin's post), I then submitted the same story to Reddit and Netscape as well just to see what would happen. 

Erin's post failed to make it to the homepage of any of the three sites.  But what I found interesting was the number of people who visited our blog based on the submissions and the number of votes the story received on each site (I voted for each story myself).  Below is a breakdown:

Digg

• 13 diggs
• 20 visitors

Reddit

• 3 points
• 128 visitors

Netscape

• 1 vote
• 1 visitor

These results surprised me.  I was surprised that the Reddit submission produced more visitors than Digg even though Digg is the 800 pound guerilla in this site genre (see chart).  I was surprised by the lack of visitors from the Netscape submission.  Anyway, here's what I learned/think I learned: (more…)

Ever now and then something hits the Internet and spreads like wildfire.  Below are four such phenomena I've come across recently that I figured I'd share.

(1) Million Dollar Homepage

On August 26, 2005, English college student Alex Tew launched the Million Dollar Homepage as a way to fund his education. The site's homepage consists of a 1000 by 1000 pixel grid (one million pixels). Tew sold mini banner ads on his homepage for $1 per pixel with a minimum buy of a ten by ten pixel block (100 pixels = $100). The site quickly became an Internet phenomenon, getting passed around from person to person. On January 1, 2006, Tew sold the last of his site's pixels on eBay. The site grossed a total of $1,037,100.

View the Wikipedia entry for the full story on the Million Dollar Homepage.

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(1) Create a graphic design that says something about the candidate.  Most candidate websites are cookie cutter in terms of design.  Stand out by creating a graphic identity that actually speaks to who the candiate is.  The Kinky Friedman for Governor website is a good example of a site design with some personality.

(2) Give visitors stuff to do besides just give you money.  Ask them to knock on doors for you.  Ask them to plan their own campaign event.  Ask them to write letters to the editors at local papers.  Ask them to hold their own voter registration drives.  Use your site to invite people to participate in your campaign and give them tools they can use to do it. (more…)