Printed Matters

This is the first in a series of posts all this week taking a hard look at the websites of the major Toronto dailies. We’ll start off with the paper with Canada’s highest daily circulation, the Toronto Star.

The Toronto Star’s website is built on the relatively new publishing system TOPS 2.0 (Total Online Publishing System) by Toronto-based imason inc. and implemented by TorStar’s own TorStar Digital development group. Almost all TorStar-owned newspapers now use this system, including, with one notable exception, all the Metroland community papers. Because of that, most of what I have to say here applies to those papers as well.

The Good

1. RSS feeds – Since I switched to using Feedreader to gather and aggregate all my news and blogs, any site that didn’t have a feed probably won’t be looked at. Not by me, at least. Would I miss much? No, because as I sit and watch the news trickle in from the various sites I have in my feed, I see the same stories. The Star has excellent categorized RSS feeds which means I can subscribe to, say, the Ideas feed and not the Sports feed.
2. Contextual submenus – The main menu stays the same no matter where you go, but the secondary menu changes depending on which main section you’re in. Works for me.
3. Completeness – they’re not shy about putting everything you might expect in a paper edition onto the web. Comics, crosswords, horoscopes, lotteries, Sudoku: it’s all there, some of it webified very nicely.
4. Timestamps – every story is timestamped, like “46 minutes ago” and so on. That helps me stay oriented as to how fresh a story is. Not so important now that I use a feed reader, but I remember that when I didn’t I really counted on that feature.
5. Their new Parent Central portal – somebody’s been reading their N2 manual! A great niche service, and fairly well done too, I might add.

The Bad

1. Home Page – it’s a link fest. As I write this there are about 250 links on the Star’s home page. Holy crap, which one should I click? What do I want to do first? Aside from the SEO implications, which are significant, that’s a usability nightmare: “Your homepage should offer users a clear starting point for the main one to four tasks they’ll undertake when visiting your site.”
2. Invalid HTML – Failed validation, 255 Errors ‘Nuff said? No. I told the guys at TorStar Digital about this over two years ago, when they were trying to foist the system on ParrySound.com. Why, I must ask, would you bother using a nice, modern XHTML Doctype if you’re not going to follow it?
3. Pictures – although the pictures that accompany a story are of excellent quality and presented at a decent size (405px wide), there is never more than one per story, and you can’t click the pic or a link to get a bigger one. This is a TOPS limitation, I’m sure.

And yes, The Ugly

1. Piss-poor search – you can only search through the last two weeks of news. For the rest of it, you have to go to a completely different site and pay money. If that’s not ass-backwards, I don’t know what is. Aside from being deeply offensive to users (as in when I click on a link in Google only to find the page has been removed), it can’t be doing much for their business model. Do these guys even get the web? It makes me wonder. But not as much as my next point:
2. No comments – you can’t comment on stories. Did they hit a time warp or something? Is this not 2008? Yes, it is, and any other news site worth its salt, including the Globe and Mail and the CBC, lets you comment on stories. For example, let’s look at the top headline (as I write) on the Globe and Mail: Opposition leads in Zimbabwe vote. It was put up on the site at 1:46 p.m. today and six hours later has 23 comments, which help to contextualize the story for me. I know that TOPS has the capability to allow this, so it’s a management issue, not a technology issue – one that they should fix as soon as possible. (An aside: the TOPS comment implementation, which you can see on most Metroland papers running TOPS, is a frustrating and silly thing.)

These last two items are really ugly, ruining for me the excellent categorized RSS feeds and generally excellent quality of the Star’s content. Overall Mark: D-.

Tomorrow: The Globe and Mail’s site gets a lookin’ at.

Google Australia has launched Gday

Using a technology platform called Mate, they can predict what the Web will look like tomorrow so you can search it today.

You can’t say I didn’t try.

I’ve been using Disqus as a replacement for the regular comment system on this blog for a couple of weeks. Today I decided to pull the plug.

There are two major things that bother me about the service.

First, and foremost, they can’t get the Display Name thing right. I had a cheesy login name, timbo12, and that’s what was showing up on people’s blogs (including my own) when I commented on stuff. I didn’t want that. And while Disqus offers the option to change your display name – which I promptly did, to Tim Burden – it misleadingly doesn’t change your display name on the comments. it only changes the display name on your Disqus profile page, which I couldn’t care less about.

So I emailed one of the developers, Jason Ha, who told me they were working on a new Wordpress plugin that would fix that problem. To me, that just makes the problem worse, since I’ll be Tim Burden on blogs that have updated their plugins, and timbo12 on blogs that have not.

My second major concern: it wipes out your trackbacks, which to me is an important part of bloggery. I want to know, and I want others to know, who has mentioned my blog posts in their blog posts.

Plus I’m not really seeing the added value. I’ve not really had a problem with people trying to impersonate me on blog comments. And hey, if they do, and they link back to my blog – more links for me!

Ok, my secret’s out: I won’t be observing Earth Hour tonight.

I think it’s a hand-holding, Kumbaya-singing, feel-good love-fest that amounts to not much more than a way for people to assuage their guilt – something like confessional for the Catholics.

“Cool, all I have to is turn off the lights for an hour once a year, and all the bad feelings I have about the damage we’ve done to the next generation’s environment? Gone!”

Meanwhile, the actual world-wide consumption of hydrocarbons will be up today, as well as pollutants, as people play charades by candlelight and use flashlights to read the latest David Suzuki column.

Just another example of environmentalists latching on to these feel-good emotional issues (baby seals, anyone?) and completely obscuring the important issues behind a cloud of publicity-pandering.

As my friend Stephen Humphrey noted, maybe it would be better to have Hate Harper Hour. And then someone should actually do something about the tar sands.

I love how The Star latched on to this as a publicity stunt, saying they’re going to observe Earth Hour too – only they’re going to do Earth Hour Lite. It’s business as usual for them, but they’re going to do it on emergency power. That means either those battery-operated lights that come on during fires – which will have to be recharged once the lights come back on – or even worse, they’ll fire up an inefficient hydrocarbon-burning generator in the basement.

Hogwash. Squeeze it, guys. Corporations need image.

We’re going to observe Earth Hour…just not so much.

More and more these days I’ve been using Wordpress as the base for web projects. The code base is fantastic, elegant, and simple, and they care about web standards and proper XHTML output. Plugins and themes are easy to write, and the documentation is excellent.

So, for sites that lend themselves to a certain blogginess – sites that are mainly content, updated regularly, and where the content falls within a few different categories – it’s a good fit. You can update a core code base from the maintainers, while your plugins and themes for that site remain in separate folders and that’s the only stuff you have to maintain.

But, sometimes you need to do non-bloggy stuff. For example, on a site for media lawyers I’m working on, we want a list of all the member lawyers. These lawyers will be able to log on and post things in a contributor or author role, and so they all have accounts on the site. It seemed natural, then, to expand the information stored for each user and use the accounts to generate the member list.

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A column by Russell Smith in the Globe and Mail this morning highlighted an aspect of the new media landscape – the same news tends to get repackaged and regurgitated on many different websites. The Project for Excellence in Journalism was the spark for Smith’s lament, when it reported 10 days ago in its annual State of the Media report that despite all the choices consumers have to get their news, they didn’t have more news to choose from.

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Ants have been farming for 50 million years, according to this AP report published in the Star. So they should have developed the equivalent of Western philosophy about 40 million years ago, right? That report next week.

I was about to go off on Andrew Keen’s book, The Cult of the Amateur, when I realized that most of his arguments had already been well picked apart by others, especially by David Weinberger. So instead, I’ll just pick on one point that I didn’t see picked on elsewhere.

At least twice in the book, Keen makes a rather critical mistake about the nature of how Google works. On page 6, he writes:

…the more people click on a link that results from a search, the more likely that link will come up in subsequent searches.

And on page 93:

Search engines like Google, which run on algorithms that rank results according to the number of previous searches, answer our search queries not with what is most true or most reliable, but with what is most popular.

These statements, which say pretty much the same thing, are both false. The notion that Google ranks its results by click popularity is a myth, perpetrated either by a confusion over how the engine actually works (based on numbers of incoming links) or by the past existence of certain search engines that did work that way (e.g. DirectHit).

I almost threw the book in the garbage after seeing that error in the first few pages of the book, which indicated the author knew nothing of what he wrote. But I trudged on, thinking his argument might not have suffered critical damage.

It did.

Keen thinks the user-driven nature of the web is swamping our culture – art, thought, news, you name it – with crap, and that even if any gems were hidden in the crap, we’ll never be able to find them because there are no good tools for finding them.

He thinks the same “monkeys” who produce all that drivel also control how search engines work, so only crap and drivel and other things monkeys like can be found.

No wonder he thinks that, given his fundamental misunderstanding about how search engines work.

Sure, yes, Google can be gamed. Nothing’s perfect. But Google can also respond. Our tools for searching for things are still evolving, still catching up to the onslaught of new information – much of it, I concede, pure drivel and crap – that the web has unleashed.

And, importantly, it’s not the monkeys doing the gaming by wildly clicking stuff in some Pavlovian frenzy. The people gaming Google have a fairly sophisticated understanding of how search engines actually work. These are the same kinds of people who could game other systems – like banks and stock markets and people – long before the web.

Keen admits that the web is a reflection of us. Since the web is people, producing things and linking to things, the very idea that the web is nothing but crap and drivel with nary a gem to be found amounts to a profound and imponderable cynicism.

Lucky for us, then, that his arguments are based on false premises.

The Encyclopedia of Life. What a grand-sounding name, and what a huge undertaking. “Ambitious, even audacious,” according to the Who We Are page at the site.

Launched a month ago, the project hopes to have a page on its site for every single species of plant, animal, and bacterium on the planet. That’s 1.8 million pages, by some estimates, with another 20 million or so species still to be discovered.

So far they have just 30,000 pages, and only about 25 completely filled out as what they call ‘exemplar pages’ showing the rich level of detail that every page will eventually contain.

So how will they accomplish this massive goal? Why, the Wikipedia model, of course. Plus $50 million. Me and you and anyone else with an interest in cataloguing the diversity of life are expected to go and help fill out the pages. Professional scientists then vet what we write.

Can it be done? Some critics don’t think so. They say it’s too much to expect of even the most dedicated of lay publics. And, they say, the $50 million is not enough to be able to pay the scientists who will then have to go and clean up all our hard work.

But we’ve been surprised before. Who knew that so many people would help to create Wikipedia? The most uncynical among us could not have predicted the overwhelming success of that project, not even those of us who had participated in DMOZ. And who’s to say the professional taxonomists won’t be drawn in by the desire to harness the tidal force of volunteer power that will surely build?

By the way, the author of this Star article about the project may have gotten it wrong when he referred to the EOL project as biology’s equivalent of the moon shot – that spot has already been taken by the Human Genome Project.

I hope it can work. The whole idea was proposed in 2003 by one of my heroes, Edward O. Wilson. I’ve been reading his books, including Biophilia (1984), since I was a young man. I got from him my first inklings of the importance of biodiversity, and the pressing need to catalog and index all the species before they disappear.

“I dream that in a few years wherever a reference to a species occurs on the Internet, there will be a hyperlink to its page in the Encyclopedia of Life,” said Dr. James Edwards, the executive director of the Encyclopedia of Life.

I can certainly help with that part. From now on, whenever I talk about the death cap mushroom or the white pine weevil – as I often do – I’ll link to the respective page at the EOL.