Subject: Re: Internet "Use" From: mmcadams@well.com (Mindy McAdams) Date: Sun, 14 Jan 1996 20:33:28 -0500

Val Cohen made a good point about reading a story from the Reuter wire on
the Web (better at the Yahoo site than at Reuter, btw): to paraphrase, Val
was frustrated because the story referred to many companies, Web sites,
examples, etc., but NONE of them were hyperlinked in the story's text.
Where's the value-added, Val asked.

I've been dealing with Reuter as part of a long-term consulting job I'm
doing (negotiating the contract, setting up the Reuter hardware, etc.), and
here are my observations:

To do what Yahoo has done (go to www.yahoo.com and follow the link that
says "Xtra!" after the category heading "News" on their home page), a web
site would have to reinvent the wheel. Reuters currently provides its
clients with an ASCII feed -- actually a feed with an ANPA header -- and to
convert that feed to HTML, your site will have to set up a software system.
Not a big or terribly hard job, but a job for someone who can program --
parse the ANPA header, convert ASCII to HTML, poll the queues at frequent
intervals, upload to your Web server, etc.

Yahoo has actually done an impressive implementation of this, using the
category designations supplied by Reuter. You can access a list of
most-recent headlines for any category, and the article comes up in clean
HTML, not horrible 
 text. I'm impressed because I can see that it's
automated and it works, and I know what it takes to get that done.

However, back to Val's point:

Good as Yahoo's implementation is, it's not very good when compared to what
we -- the news readers -- really want. We know what hypertext can do when
done well (to see my favorite implementation, sign up for a free trial of
Encyclopaedia Britannica on the Web via www.pathfinder.com), and that means
relevant links embedded in the story.

Well, today that still means human labor, and pretty darned intelligent
human labor at that. Britannica did their incredible implementation (I mean
it, go and look!) with software, but they used a defined set of data (their
own) offline for the link-generating engine to process. To run such an
engine real-time across the Web and trust it to come up with *relevant*
rather than extraneous links -- at the rate of change required by a news
feed -- is just asking too much of today's technology.

Val went on to say that -- because it can't be done with software today --
the contextual hypertext many of us crave requires that news organizations
spend some real money on *staff* for their online operations. It bears
reiteration:

>How does a news organization
>differentiate itself, and put its editorial mark on information, if it's
>simply regurgitating wire feeds that were intended and written for print
>pubs?

I see a lot of people with Web sites hiring graphic designers to create
sites, or parts of sites, and paying them $80 to $100 an hour to create
good graphics and often bad (not maintainable) HTML. I have made money
fixing pages of HTML code that someone else already got paid a bundle to
write, because the code was written in such a way that the pages looked
good *only* on a PC with 800 x 600 resolution and the default fonts and
window width from Netscape. (Anywhere else, the page falls apart.)

Where's the money for the value-added?

Where's the $80-an-hour for the experienced editors who can evaluate Web
resources, pull them together on the fly (on deadline), code the HTML
*cleanly* and revise an entire site in 15 minutes to keep up with a
breaking news situation?

Where's the $80-an-hour for the editorial QA (quality assurance) person who
will regularly check through the site for broken links, outdated content,
missing references?

A site such as HotWired or c|net pays for that kind of expertise. I have
yet to hear about any online newspaper that does or wants to.


- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Mindy McAdams     mmcadams@well.com      http://www.sentex.net/~mmcadams/
 Web Consultant    Resume online:  http://www.sentex.net/~mmcadams/resume/
           Working on new media and interface design since 1990
- ---------------- Veteran of The Washington Post Digital Ink ---------------



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