Okay, I read all of my news online. And I am generally quite happy about the experience. I can get a number of views from a large number of sources that I may or may not agree with. This is all great. I love the text based information that I get. But I’ll link to an offending page here first to explain what I mean.
This is an interesting story. After reading the headline and first sentence, I wanna check out that picture. Obviously it is too small to see much of anything at all. I can basically make out a dude and a bridge. But wait? Oh yeah! When I hover my mouse over it it turns into the pointy finger meaning it will lead to an expanded picture. What happens next? I click on the link and what do I get? The same-sized image on a blank page. WTF is that?!?!
For those of you who read BBC News, they are the world’s worst. They aren’t even a real newspaper, so any questions of creating some kind of incentive to buying the print version are all out. Not to mention that it is a not-for-profit outfit funded by the Brits. Though upon current viewing of their site, they have gotten better at keeping the images relevant (for example, having one person’s face in the main picture). True, I don’t need a 640x400 pixel of a closeup of some guy’s face, but if you are going to try to explain some scene visually, why not choose a bigger picture? The BBC doesn’t normally allow this either except for special sections.
Look, This isn’t 1998. I’ve been on the internet for a long freaking time (since 1995) and I’ve seen loads of changes, some good, some bad, but I’ve generally welcomed the benefits afforded by higher bandwidth. Why does the BBC insist on not putting up good photos?!? Various news outfits are notorious for it. The New York Times can be okay. They make you register, and you have to pay for old articles or other premium content. I realize that bandwith costs can be a constricting factor, but I think its important to realize that a picture is worth a thousand words.
Secondly, and I’m looking at you, news.yahoo.com, cnn.com, and countless others, stop creating content and making it available exclusively in video format. Especially if said format requires me to open Realplayer (oh god, how I could rant about that abomination). I find it especially stupid on CNN.com. If I wanna see video, I’ll turn on the TV. If you aren’t going to make more than two minutes of content available for me at a time, then don’t bother. The only video that I do actively seek out would be youtube style content. Why? Because it’s nearly instantaneously available, it requires no special players (not counting the flash jury-rigging involved) and is easily discarded after I finish. If I click a video link on CNN.com, or yahoo news, I’ll wait for a popup window (in yahoo news’ case) wait for it to load an imbedded version of media player or realplayer (after I choose, of course), and then undergo the buffering. And I have a fast computer. What it does is break the rhythm of what I’m doing. If I’m browsing a website, I’ll have several things that interest me, after a cursory glance, and I’ll quickly go through them all. If there’s this extra video involved, I’ll have to break that. I know this, so I avoid that.
If you want to get people to actually watch these things, Yahoo!, CNN, et al, copy the youtube-style player and have it expand the rest of the page down in some kind of ajax-style magic. For those of you who don’t know, Ajax is a term for the techniques involved that makes websites like Google Maps, and Gmail possible. It’s not essential for the whole webpage to refresh if only a part of it needs it. Then I’ll watch those videos. Hell, you can even put video ads in beforehand, and I may watch them if they are less than 5 seconds.
So yeah, news websites, you need help. The stupid small pictures are useless, and the video is annoying and not worth clicking. It’s not like there isn’t better technology around, and the youtube style video isn’t patented, because any old video website has caught on by now.