The News Width

One of the basic properties of old world programmed media was the fixed time slot. This was a particularly defining feature of the news. There had to be exactly 30 minutes (or whatever) of news to fill the slot. If that day was slow, the news was padded with light stuff, if that day was hot, then the light stuff was dropped as were other moderately important features.

You would think that that approach to media would be one of the first to drop online. We may, perhaps, be forgiving of the online presence of mainstream media - there is a fixed real estate on their front page. However, having become aware of the issue, I'm less forgiving of Web 2.0 aggregators including: memeorandum/techmeme, TailRank and even our own BlogPulse. Take techmeme for example. Stories are ranked according, in part (I'm guessing) to how many citations they get from which bloggers. However, on one day, a story with citations from A and B may appear on the front page whereas on another it may not - depending not on how important that story is absolutely, but how important it is relative to all other stories.

I say that we should be looking for interfaces to information that reflect how important that information is and which don't persist artifacts of the very media that we are (apparently) trying to escape.

Comments

[Kevin Burton]

Well we certanly don't suffer from that problem. We run nearly 1k stories per day and the number fluctuates.

These just show up on page 2 rather than page 1...

Is this non-obvious?

[Stew]

Kevin - isn't that's the point being made? Why stick with paginating through ten items at a time when Tailrank could sometimes have a slow news day (and end up putting Friday cat blogging on the front page) and sometimes have more than ten stories being furiously discussed, some of which are pushed to page 2 because they broke an hour or two earlier than the others?

Users surely don't care how many stories are on the page, as long as everything loads snappily enough.

Having said all that - I'm not absolutely sure what the benefit would be. :)

[Kevin Burton]

Stew...

"Users surely don't care how many stories are on the page, as long as everything loads snappily enough."

That's just the issue.... with too many items on the page it won't load fast. Study after study shows that even adding 100ms chases them away....

:-/