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Archive for the 'Website Design' Category

The Slate Files or, How I Started Blogging for Slate (Maybe)

Published by William Beutler on October 19, 2008 in Domains, Mickey Kaus, Seriously, Website Design and William Beutler. 1 Comment

Slate redesigned its website this weekend. Unlike the dramatic redesign in 2006 or the reconstructive surgery performed on The Atlantic (magazine and website) this past month, the 14-year-old news commentary “magazine” went under for nothing more than a facelift: the logo remains the same while the site has been merely streamlined: gone is the two-column format and better still, so are the categories at left that would pop out on mouseover, obscuring the headlines I was trying to read. (Instead they pop out of the nav bar at top.) The effect is (mostly) a good one:

If you’ve already forgotten the old version, compare with this, although it doesn’t show the two columns that may have saved space but ultimately produced a confused chronology.

More promising, Slate has turned its blogs-in-name-only (BINOs?) into real deal blogs, complete with permalinks. For years, the site’s handful of blogs were published using the same software as its news articles. In fact, it wasn’t really clear which were columns and which were blogs; until recently, only Kausfiles read as you would expect of a blog. Here is his page now:

This redesign is actually a throwback to the old Kausfiles.com, which Kaus published on his own in the late 1990s until agreeing to be acquired (and paid) by Slate. And it is Kaus who probably benefits the most; because Slate’s software couldn’t automatically create permalinks, if he wanted to make it easy for someone to link, he would have to build an anchor tag by hand. And making writers learn to code detracts from what they’re best at: writing.

There are still some kinks to be worked out. If you click on “Kausfiles” from the front page sidebar, it brings you not to the blog itself but to a list of recent headlines, some of which are oddly duplicative. Better then is to just type kausfiles.com into your address bar, which brings you to http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/kausfiles/default.aspx, which is the screen capped above. That’s still at least one /blogs too many, but at least the permalinks are now search engine-friendly (including words from the title as opposed to randomly assigned numbers).

And if you think you can prune that back to http://www.slate.com/blogs/ and find a list of Slate’s blogs, well, no… and you may see a little farther up Slate’s skirt than either of you had bargained for:

Thank you for being so welcoming! What’s that… join, you say? Well, why not? Here I am:

And in fact, I now have an account with Slate that allows me to… well, I’m not quite sure. Almost certainly nothing, I am fairly sure. But if Blog P.I. moves to Slate, you’ll be the first to know.

C-SPAN 2.0 (Ft. New Media Strategies)

Published by William Beutler on August 13, 2008 in #DNC08, #RNC08, 2008 Conventions, Barack Obama, Blog Consultants, C-SPAN, Cable News, DNC, John McCain, Metapost, New Media Strategies, RNC, Television, Twitter, Web 2.0, Web video, Website Design, White House '08 and William Beutler. 9 Comments

C-SPAN 2.0 Featuring New Media Strategies
I don’t write about clients often. When I do it’s really something, and this is really something: New Media Strategies will be working through the conventions with C-SPAN, perhaps my favorite Beltway news organization, to run their Convention Hub. The website was designed by NMS partner JESS3, will be maintained by the multi-partisan Public Affairs practice, with editorial oversight and video from the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network. I wish I could show it to you. I can’t just yet, but as I said, it’s going to be really something.

What I can offer are details about the Convention Hub microsites. There will be two, one for each convention, with video and blog coverage around the clock:

  • C-SPAN will provide exclusive video from the conventions, and for the first time, this C-SPAN video is searchable, clippable and embeddable. As someone who has tried (unsuccessfully) to jerry-rig an embeddable C-SPAN video in the past, this is a huge leap forward.

  • NMS will feed the latest convention reporting and blogging to the Convention Hub pretty much non-stop. Or as our official language puts it, “extensive real-time blogosphere coverage using NMS’s proprietary combination of software and trained human analysts.”

  • C-SPAN Campaign 2008 LogoMore about that software another time; all I can say is that it answers the questions I’ve asked about such analysis tools.

  • The Hub will also include Twitter feeds of users using the hashtags #RNC08 and #DNC08 (and surely other tags, as their usage rises).

  • The site goes live at c-span.org/politics later this month. The Democratic Hub will be at c-span.org/politics/DNC08 and the Republican Hub will be at c-span.org/politics/RNC08.

  • NMS will have a presence at each convention to help to facilitate coverage and promote the Convention Hub. It certainly doesn’t hurt that we have bloggers credentialed to both (see you in St. Paul).

  • There is more, but I’m not exactly sure what I didn’t see in the press release that’s public, so I’d better hold off for now. At the moment, this is the only public hint on c-span.org:

C-SPAN Convention Hub banner teaser

Meanwhile, the C-SPAN Convention Hub is already drawing praise from one of C-SPAN’s (few) notable critics. The Sunlight Foundation has differed with C-SPAN before over distribution of copyrighted C-SPAN video, so they are enthusiastic about the open nature of the Convention Hubs:

The convention announcement marks a new moment for C-SPAN as a modern Internet information provider. Once a small cable channel with a dream; now with embeddable web video, Twitter hashtags, and aggregated blog posts.

As a longtime C-SPAN junkie, I couldn’t be more proud to play a small part in this project. How dependent am I on the C-SPAN network?

  • I wake up to Washington Journal every weekday morning (my Twitter account will bear this out).

  • Before I found podcasts, I’d listen to streaming Realplayer segments from the program (I still listen to the podcast of Brian Lamb’s Sunday night Q&A).

  • Back in college I would sometimes wake up early (4 a.m.) to catch particular episodes live, such as the first of the Hitchens-Sullivan conversations with Lamb, shortly after 9/11.

  • If it’s the weekend and my television is not on baseball or football, it’s on BookTV.

  • The tagline of my personal blog, The Washington Canard, is: “Where C-SPAN is the local TV news.”

The good news is that it’s a supportable addiction.

And by way of conclusion, a confession: I want this searchable video for my own reasons. On Election night 2004, The Hotline worked all through the night covering the coverage, as the election tipped from Kerry winning the exit polls to Bush winning the popular vote. If you’ve seen my Facebook photo, this is where that crazy image comes from.

As usual, C-SPAN cameras were in the office for Chuck Todd and Vaughn Ververs to offer recaps, also deep into the morning hours. Sometime around 3 o’clock in the morning, I informed friends watching the coverage from back on the West Coast to look carefully: As the cameras rolled, I picked up a plastic trash bin and… well, I danced through the background.

The waltz, I think.

I entered left with vulcanized dance partner, twirling across one shoulder, behind the talking head, past the other shoulder, exiting right. To this date, it’s still my best television appearance. And I look forward to the day, much sooner now, that I can embed this on Blog P.I.

Matthew Yglesias’ Career Reduced to a Timeline

Published by William Beutler on August 11, 2008 in Atrios, Beltway media, Charts and Graphs, Instapundit, Metapost, Startups, Website Design and William Beutler. 7 Comments

As frequent readers of political blogs undoubtedly know, famous-for-DC blogger Matt Yglesias recently gave up the job of many others’ lifetimes, blogging for The Atlantic, to write the same typically eponymous blog he has posted to more or less daily since 2002, now for the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

I say “typically” because Yglesias’ blogging history has taken a few turns more than most bloggers of comparable influence and readership. I wrote about this early on at Blog P.I., when Yglesias gave up simultaneous blogging duties to focus on just one and write a book, the recently published “Heads in the Sand”. I praised the move, but when he changed sites once more just a few months later, I wasn’t inclined to devote another post to it.

Yglesias is of course far from the only blogger to have changed blogs more than once at this point in blog history. I’ve done it myself a few times. At the top levels, Instapundit and Atrios both eventually migrated away from Blogspot [though as a commenter notes, Duncan still uses Blogger], and Reynolds recently moved his site again to Pajamas Media. But that’s nothing compared to Yglesias, a veritable rolling stone even if he is far from a complete unknown.

In order to give a fuller picture of what I’m talking about, I’ve created a handy chart in Keynote that shows at which URLs he has written his blog(s) and when:

Small Yglesias Timeline

This is the small version, of course. Click on the image to visit my Flickr account and see it full-size. For specific dates and the explanation for that short, unlabeled “50% red” rectangle, let’s go below the fold. Otherwise, check back after another four or five Yglesias blogs, when I’ll probably have another update.

Continue reading ‘Matthew Yglesias’ Career Reduced to a Timeline’

When Not to Blog About the White House

Published by William Beutler on August 10, 2008 in Barack Obama, Beltway media, Blogs vs. MSM, George W. Bush, Journalism, Journalist Bloggers, MSM, MSM vs. Blogs, Metapost, National Politics, Newspaper Columnists, Newspapers, Startups, The Politico, Tough Crowd, Twitter, Washington Post, Website Design, White House '08 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

Politico sign in DC Metro from David Boyle in DC via Flickr.

Last week I traded a series of Twitter “@ messages” with Jay Rosen, the NYU journalism professor, blogger and media critic. The first one asked:

Maybe you know. Q: why doesn’t Politico have a Ben Smith for the White House? Bets on whether they’ll get one if Obama wins?
He’s got a point. The Politico lists the organization’s designated blogs on its front-page in this order: Ben Smith on Dems, Jonathan Martin on GOP, Shenanigans on Gossip, The Scorecard on Campaigns, The Crypt on Congress, Michael Calderone on Media, James Kotecki on whatever. The Politico is literally blogging about “whatever” but not about “the White House.” So I guessed, in fewer than 140 characters:
Smith-Martin are a package deal, covering both primaries. Politico: more campaign, less governing? But that’s a great idea.
Prof. Rosen suggested in turn:
How about a PI post? Politico columnists for the Dems, Reps, Congress, Media, Gossip, Campaign trail, but no White House?
To which I replied:
Mike Allen certainly covers the WH. But not in blog form, true. Have friends down there, so I can ask. Possible PI post indeed.

And so I did, getting in touch with a half-dozen or so current and former Politico writers, asking for their thoughts on background. I also made an effort to get VandeHarris on the record, but they did not return e-mails by my less-than-rigorously self-enforced deadline.

So here’s what I could piece together:

  • When the Politico launched a little under two years ago, the presidential campaign offered the biggest opportunity first. Politico was first conceived as a newspaper to be called Capitol Leader — “Yet Another Newspaper Aimed at Capitol Hill” as the Washington Post had it. The Executive branch wasn’t even in the picture until John Harris and Jim VandeHei were.

  • As noted above, the newspaper that did emerge hired the much-acclaimed, much-accosted former White House reporter for Time and WaPo, Mike Allen. He writes big stories, is in good with Drudge, and produces content on a daily basis like everyone else. The format of his output is a secondary matter.

  • Most everyone I talked to seemed to assume that no matter who won the presidential election, Politico would increase their White House coverage after the election. After all, it’s the logical continuation of the campaign stories they are covering now. Some said they thought a blog would be involved, and no one volunteered the opposite.

One thing that occurs to me is that other major newspapers have blogs covering the White House as a beat, as do regional newspapers with Washington correspondents, but none of them command major audiences (even when they resort to Olympics T&A).

People care about the big stories that emanate from the White House, and they’ll get that from every newspaper and every political blog inside the Beltway, but few are looking for the day-to-day minutiae. Bush is a lame duck, interest has waned even in some of the bigger stories, and other national newspapers have moved their White House correspondents to the campaign trail.

The answer given reminds me a bit of the response I got in the summer of 2006 when I first wrote about the opening for a “Republican ActBlue”, viz., just wait. It may be worth noting, the person who did finally create one was not yet working on it at that time.

So, yes, the Politico will probably have a White House blog next year. Whether Politico writes the one that Jay Rosen is hoping for remains to be seen.

Photograph by David Boyle in DC via Flickr.

The Cult of Chuck Todd

Published by William Beutler on August 6, 2008 in Cable News, Hotline, MSNBC, Metapost and Website Design. 2 Comments

Hey, I’m as big a fan of Chuck Todd as anyone*, and the Viva Chuck Todd blog from Cerebral Itch is inspired:

Viva Chuck Todd blog header

Especially the e-mail interviews with his grandmother in Florida. But now this is really getting out of hand:

Chuckolytes Unite behind Chuck Todd, whatever that means.

(Click the image to visit the site.) I’m not even sure what “Chuckolyte” is supposed to mean. Is it a play on “electrolyte”? Is it supposed to sound like “chocolate”? Not that either would make any sense. Nor have the folks behind Cerebral Itch explained what it’s supposed to mean. [Update: Via the "Viva Chuck Todd Editorial Dept." in the comments, it is a play on "acolyte." Makes sense now, but a little convoluted.]

A former fellow Hotliner asked the other day what Chuck thinks of his newfound following. I haven’t asked, and I’m not going to bother him with this. This is partly because my answer was: I’m sure he’s aware of it, but I’m also sure he isn’t paying it that much attention.

I will give them this — the graphics are all pretty good, even this weird, stylized icon of the best goatee in cable news:

Chuck Todd icon

*Arguably bigger, since he gave me my first paying job in Washington.

Expecting the Spectator

Published by William Beutler on July 8, 2008 in Google, Journalist Bloggers, Spam, Technology, Website Design, William Beutler and YouTube. 0 Comments

I don’t know why, but since last night, the American Spectator’s website at spectator.org has been blocked for being a “reported attack site”:

American Spectator website blocked as “attack site”

Fortunately, perhaps, Google provides diagnostic tools for those curious about where the site has gone:

Google diagnostics on the Spectator as an “attack site”

Alas, I don’t know enough about network security to make a diagnosis. (Dammit Jim, I’m a private eye, not a doctor.)

As of this morning, I can get the website to load in Safari but not in Firefox 3, albeit intermittently. The front page is accessible, but when I try to visit the blog, I get this instead:

American Spectator will cause “harm” to your computer

In the past, Google has been accused of removing conservative-aligned content from YouTube and from Google News, but I see no evidence that this is what’s happened this time. I’m not even quite sure why Google is responsible for making this call or providing these diagnostics.

What’s most likely is the Spectator’s webmaster left a security hole unplugged and the site was taken advantage of by opportunistic spammers, which is something of a tautology.

I’ve put an e-mail in to a contact at the Spectator, and if I find out what happened, I’ll provide an update in this post.

Update: Looks like I called it. The site still isn’t working for me in Firefox, but via Safari, they offer this explanation:

We have received a number of inquiries regarding the fact that Spectator.org has been designated a “harmful site” by Google, because of outside entities attempting to use our site to distribute malicious software. We have been working with our Web hosting company to address the issue, and believe that it has been resolved and that our site is safe to visit, though there is a lag time before Google can remove the “harmful site” status. In the meantime, if you normally find us via Google, you can still visit us by typing Spectator.org directly into your browser, or by entering our site via Yahoo. Thank you for your understanding.

Portrait of the Smear Artists as an Old Boys’ Club

Published by William Beutler on July 3, 2008 in #pdf2008, Barack Obama, Charts and Graphs, Online Campaigns, Tech Blogosphere, Urban Legends, Web 2.0, Website Design, White House '08 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

Example of Obama’s Fight the Smears pageIt’s been a few weeks since Barack Obama’s presidential campaign unveiled its much-discussed Fight the Smears microsite. It’s certainly a daring move, and probably the right one. Although a cardinal rule of politics has long been “don’t repeat the charges against you,” there does reach a point where that no longer holds. John Kerry learned this the hard way, and Obama should get credit for adjusting accordingly.

One aspect I haven’t seen discussed in any great detail is the second page of the website, “Behind the Smears”. It’s not easily found — although it occupies the somewhat prominent last spot in the list of links at left, it’s also buried at the bottom of the page, below the main content and just above the site disclaimers.

The main content of said page is a chart showing the relationships between the accusers, and it looks like this:

Network of Obama “smears”

It’s pretty neat, but it’s also under-designed. After all, it seems to claim that the 1992 Clinton campaign itself is is smearing him, when all it means is that… actually, I’m not sure what it’s saying. What’s more, the lines are too light and don’t convey any specific information about how they are connected. There are a few small revisions which would make it more intuitive: a dotted line for lesser connections, or bigger names for those with more influence.

Relationship mapping is becoming a bigger deal in the blogosphere as more rigorous and even scholarly studies are done about the connections between blogs and attempts are made to quantify the influence one has upon another. This is driven in part by curiosity and in part by my own industry, where marketers are desperate to accurately quantify their impact. One example comes from Linkfluence, as demoed at Personal Democracy Forum this year:

Political blog map via Linkfluence

But how useful is this information? It’s nice to see a representation of the political ’sphere at the macro level. Some insights can certainly be derived therefrom, but it leaves a lot unsaid. For example, it doesn’t necessarily help me to know that one site has linked to another. I need to know why. I need to be able to drill down, and find out how they are arranged by a common link or keyword.

Don’t get me wrong, though: I’m all for pretty pictures.

And while the Obama campaign chart isn’t all that pretty and ultimately not that informative, it’s nevertheless a step in the right direction. The more and better tools a campaign can give to its online supporters, the more investment (in time as well as money) they are likely to make in turn.

The New Hotlineness

Published by William Beutler on April 18, 2008 in Beltway media, Hotline, Seriously, Website Design and William Beutler. 0 Comments

I’d been hearing the rumors for a few weeks but, finally, the new National Journal site design has had its debut. But on a Friday?

In Washington, bad news always gets released on Fridays. The idea is to bury it just as the week’s traditional news cycle is winding down — as reporters are racing to get out of, or heading out on the, town.

Is that what’s going on here? Here’s the page specific to The Hotline, so you be the judge:

The New Hotline website design on National Journal

It’s certainly much more modern than the National Journal website of old (see below right). You can’t tell from the screen shot, but there is just as much actual content on the page; it’s just been pushed below the fold. Now it resembles nothing so much as a wonkier version of Slate (which has had its own disastrous redesigns, not that I’m calling this one disastrous).

But that red is so neon it looks like it belongs on the cover of Wired, and for the moment it clashes badly with the colors of the sponsor’s advertisement.

Classic (Old) Hotline website designIt also looks odd next to the darker red, which is more representative of the colors used across the site. Indeed, click over to Congress Daily and National Journal (aka “The Magazine”) and you may think you’re losing your eyesight.

On the other hand, I count two links to my old online column/daily blog report, The Blogometer, apparently the only National Journal feature with two links on this particular page. That alone is enough to get a thumbs-up from me.

Well done, National Journal!

Lost in McCainSpace

Published by William Beutler on April 4, 2008 in John McCain, Online Fundraising, Social Networking, Website Design, White House '08 and William Beutler. 3 Comments

A little over a year ago, I wrote a deservedly unkind and undeservedly lengthy post about John McCain’s social network-in-name-only. It was essentially just a personalized donation page, glorified by its socnet-ish name: McCainSpace. Or MyMcCain. That part hadn’t been sorted out by its launch.

In any case, that was then. I hadn’t been back since (who thought back then there would be a McCain campaign right now?) and recently decided that a follow-up might be in order. So what is it now?

It’s exactly the same. The McCain campaign website doesn’t seem to have much interest in making their website into a real destination. As I said then, a campaign does not need a social network of its own, but if you’re going to claim one, actually have one.

Actually, something has changed with the profile I used to illustrate the problem last year. It’s Debaser, the Un Chien Andalou/Black Francis-inspired username of Todd Zeigler at Bivings Group. Here’s the image I posted last year:

The page is unchanged, with one exception. Here’s the detail:

Debaser pulls in $100 for John McCain

Granted, $100 is not a lot, for a presidential campaign or the fourteen months between the first screen shot and the second. But for a website that’s essentially abandoned, it’s a fortune.

I asked Zeigler if he had donated, or knew who had. The first word of his reply: “Weird.” Zeigler logged in and found out that the donor hailed from the Delmarva Peninsula and was not known to him. In an e-mail reply he allowed me to share, Zeigler offered two possibilities:

(1) [Name Redacted] stumbled across my page (or blog post) and gave through it.
(2) Funny business.

I’m going with (1) but for Debaser to reach its assigned goal, (2) may have to get involved.

Can You Diggggg It?

Published by William Beutler on March 29, 2008 in Cybersquatting, Digg, Domains, Website Design and William Beutler. 0 Comments

Much is made of the double-G in the name and URL of the popular social news website Digg. The misspelled word is a real asset: it is much more memorable than if it was just Dig.com. But Kevin Rose and company couldn’t have had that website if they wanted it: it belongs to the Walt Disney Company. It’s a corporate page for the Disney Internet Group, which makes sense.

What about spellings with more than two Gs? A few minutes of casual WHOISing reveals the answers:

  • I am actually surprised that Diggg.com is not in use, being that the most plausible misspelling. Something is definitely there, but the server only times out. The domain is registered to someone in Oslo, Norway whose first name is Kristian and last name contains letters that will not render in my browser.

  • Digggg.com is more what you’d expect: A parked domain which serves Google contextual ads. It’s registered to somebody in Boise, Idaho who probably has many, many more pages like this one.

  • How about Diggggg.com? That you can register at your favorite registrar. It’s not taken. If you do decide to pick it up, why not leave a note in the comments?