Ordinary people creating less Web content these days

One of my coworkers shared this interesting chart on how "social engagement is changing."

My translation: People used to blog about their cats and their belly buttons, but now they pass around links to news stories and other stuff.

Why? My theory:

Because creating good content is FREAKING HARD. Much easier to pass around the good stuff than to sit down and generate it! Social media (Facebook, Twitter) make it really easy to share links.

Said coworker (Rob Quigley, my Beatles trivia partner, Statesman social media editor and writer for Old Media New Tricks) says he believes this is good news for newspapers. I optimistically agree!

Meserole '05 shares his video knowledge with Batt

Today at the Battalion, Jordan Meserole '05 of KBTX is doing a workshop in which he'll talk about scene composition and building a story with your camera, going from raw footage to finished product.

A couple years ago, Meserole was kind enough to talk with us about his experience being embedded with a Texas search and rescue team during Hurricane Dolly. You can read about it here.

Video on Wright '92 and his Chicago marketing firm

Get a great look inside the work that A&M journalism grad Sherman Wright '92 does with his marketing company, Common Ground, in this show from ABC 7 Chicago (which Roland Martin posted awhile back on his blog). The section on Wright starts at 5:12, but the hip-hop violinist before him is pretty cool, too.

The iPad, the user and the design in between them

OK, one more post about iPads/tablets/e-readers and user interfaces, and then I will get back to actual Aggie-related journalism news, of which I have quite the backlog.

First, Adobe and Wired have rolled out a digital magazine prototype that works across multiple platforms, which is what I was hoping for in my last post. Here's a video:



And the need for an intuitive interface is underlined by a fairly unbelievable occurrence in the past few days. Friday, a blog called ReadWriteWeb posted an entry about logging into Facebook that wound up, for some period of time, being one of the top five search results if you Googled "facebook login." Literally hundreds of people went to this blog post instead of to Facebook.com, tried to log in to Facebook and then posted angry comments on the blog saying they didn't like the way Facebook had been redesigned because it was too hard to log in.

I went to that blog and read over the comments and am satisfied it's not a joke. Some several hundred people literally thought it was Facebook despite it not being called Facebook and not being at Facebook.com, and were unable to log in but perfectly able to leave angry comments saying how stupid Facebook was.

Lots of folks have had great fun mocking this, of course; others are simply worried about the future of humanity. However, a really thoughtful, elegant mea culpa comes from a designer/developer named Ed Finkler at Funkatron.com, who begins also by talking about the iPad user interface. Here's an excerpt of my favorite parts:

• How is it the fault of the users when we present them with multiple, barely-differentiated text fields within the same window. Is it really surprising that they don’t understand the differences between each? And is it surprising that they choose to use the one which works with more natural language, rather than entering syntactically-unnatural domain names?

• There is LOADS of anecdotal evidence that most users simply use search engines as a sort of natural language CLI. Shouldn’t we be designing interfaces that work in the way most natural for the majority of users?

These people have better things to do with their days than tweaking out the spacing in their browser toolbars. A computer for them is a utility. One that is increasingly complex, and one that is used because it’s the only option for accomplishing certain things – not because it’s a good option.

It’s kind of like the Photoshop Problem: when people want to crop a picture, we give them Photoshop. Photoshop is a behemoth application with nearly every image editing and touchup function imaginable, and it is terribly complex.

...

When folks need an elevator, we should give them an elevator, not an airplane. We’ve been giving them airplanes for 30 years, and then laughing at them for being too stupid to fly them right.

...

I certainly don’t think that the computer can become (anytime soon) a magic box that determines our whims, nor do I think that people shouldn’t have to learn some things.

What I do think is that the current interface modern OSes on computers provide is simply overwhelming for most users, to the point that it’s very challenging to learn how to accomplish tasks without a very significant investment of time. Driving would be a good example of a task that does require investment of time, but is not so overwhelming that the vast majority of people fundamentally get it wrong: you don’t see people steering with their feet, or accelerating and braking with the radio. I’d argue that modern computer interfaces, in a rush to offer flexibility and capability, make it possible to steer with your hands, feet, teeth, and knees — and don’t make it particularly clear which one is best.

Hearst's e-reader: the Skiff

Click here for photo and description of the e-reader designed by Hearst -- still black-and-white for now, but color is rumored, and it apparently builds in advertising features.

As a consumer, I have to say I'd buy the product that's in color and DOESN'T have advertising features... as a journalist I'd say we're better off designing our product to be viewed on many platforms. Am I wrong or is it strange for us to start making the TVs when what we're good at is making the TV shows? That said, I hate to be negative when what we need is new ideas and execution, which is clearly what Hearst is doing here.

Thank you to @givingcity for tweeting this link! Here's some of what's coming up soon on this blog: a chance to help record the history of journalism at A&M; great pics and a video from two fellow Aggie journalists; and a nice feature from the Battalion.

Happy Valentine's Day y'all!

A video from the future: News reading on a tablet

The future could be gorgeous. Until I saw this, I didn't have a clear vision of what "repackaging news for digital readers" might look like, other than, well, a Web page.

Now I do.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

This is just one possible concept, of course, but it's nicely thought out and beautifully presented. Many thanks to @StKonrath for tweeting this.