CNN.com Beta: Behind the Scenes

The good folks at CNN.com have launched a beta site for their ongoing redesign of the main cnn.com experience, at http://beta.cnn.com/

Accompanying the beta site, they’ve launched a blog, Behind the Scenes at CNN.com, where they are encouraging discussion of the redesign.

It’s a great concept – specifically highlighting what the team is trying to accomplish in the redesign, and going beyond the constraints of carefully chosen focus groups under NDAs for a far more transparent and open forum.

Not all the comments will be terribly valuable, of course; the first comment on the first post says in its entirety: “It’s too white. Not enough color. print is too small. Make it more colorful like USA Today. com or MSNBC.com.”

But when all the comments are taken together, they will undoubtedly get insights and guidance from their most vocal constituents which will help guide their evolution, and which they would only have received too late (or not at all) under the old “design and build under a cloud of secrecy, then reveal only when it is all complete” approach.

They’re also explicitly working on what Dermot Waters characterizes as “being a good web citizen” by pointing to local news sources and blog posts which are outside CNN’s domain.

The idea, which sounds almost self-evident but isn’t always well understood by online media sites, is that:

. . . by being a good web citizen, we fulfill our core mission by doing whatever it takes to help you get the full story — even if it takes you away from CNN.com. If we do that well, we believe you’ll keep coming back.

It will be interesting to watch the site (and the discussion about its goals and their fulfillment) evolve.

(In the interest of full disclosure, Turner Broadcasting is an Optaros client – but that doesn’t influence what I’ve said above except that I’ve had a chance to meet some of the folks behind the effort and know that they get it and mean what they say.)

Plugin mania

I’ve recently added a bunch-o-plugins. Please let me know if you notice anything funky going on in terms of being able to access the blog, make comments, etc.

Plug-ins I’m trying:

• Bad Behavior – an anti-spam plugin to compliment Akismet.
• Dagon Design Form Mailer for WordPress – to enable the contact page and let people send me email without publishing an email address
• Kramer – which claims to add inbound links to each post as pingbacks, even if the person linking to the post does ping, using technorati.
• Automatic Stats – which enables wordpress.com’s stats package even for hosted blogs

All goodness.

I’m also thinking about enabling Flickr photo and del.icio.us links into my feedburner feeds – so you may see some changes in the feed.

Profiles of Web 2.0 users and usage

Two publications recently came out which try to break out of the “everyone uses Web 2.0″ versus “no one uses Web 2.0″ argument and produce more detailed breakdowns of different kinds of people and different ways of using different web 2.0 technologies.

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Words, Words, Words

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words. Words. Words.
- Hamlet, Act II, Scene ii

I’m not normally prone to quoting Shakespeare – more of a Modernist and Americanist by (academic) training and by inclination. But a few blog memes this weekend have me thinking of Hamlet and his antic disposition, and the potential for words to be meaningless.

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The Real Trouble With Twitter – There’s no There, There

(Image from Darren Greaves (Boncey) via Creative Commons license)

I’ve been thinking a lot about – and playing around with – Twitter. These Dylan lyrics came to on the plane this morning, as an apt description of why I’ve had a hard time “getting” the value of Twitter:

And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you hear, my darling young one?
. . .
Heard ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listenin’,
. . .
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard,
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

No, I’m not suggesting that Twitter is an omen of some rapidly upcoming flood. It’s the middle line there I’m thinking of.

Annalee Newitz writes in “The Trouble with Twitter” that:

Twitter’s popularity reflects the accelerating pace in cities: people use Twitter as they stroll around with mobiles, and the rapidity of their updates reflects a sense that new, exciting things are happening to them every minute, not just every few hours (blog time) or every day (newspaper time).

But the problem I have with Twitter isn’t that it is too fast, and thus discourages reflective thought, or that the messages are too short, and thus discourage contemplative rhetoric. Those things are true, but not the problem. (They’re equally true of SMS and of IM).

The problem is that no one is listening.

More accurately, the problem with Twitter is that there is no conversation to listen to. To borrow Gertrude Stein’s description of Oakland, there’s no there there.

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