Robot Loves Kitten

It’s been bugging me that newspapers and other publishing types are still hanging on to the idea of “editions” on their Web site.

Editors program the day’s news, package it up into an updated homepage, and voila! Success! Eureka! Brilliant! Their job is done!

Unless I visit their site more than once a day.

At which point, I’ve already seen all those stories, and I’m looking for something new. Which I can’t find anywhere, because it’s all buried in a mess of sections and categories. So here I am: a voracious reader, at your site, ready to engage with whatever you’ve got — and nothing. You don’t have time for me, you’re working on tomorrow’s edition & homepage (which will be brilliant, you add). Later, you sit at your desk and wonder why everyone’s got you on deathwatch.

I’ve been having this problem with The New York Times, so i decided to take a stab at fixing it. So here’s a little experiment in a reader’s view of the news. It’s what I expected from MyTimes, but didn’t get.

SimplerTimes: What’s New at The New York Times

The site is very simple. You simply click on the “Categories” link to customize the sections you want to see. Click “Update” and your preferences are saved in a cookie. The page now lists recent articles from the sections you’re interested in, most recent first.

Articles with a red flag are brand new within the past 2 hours, articles with a yellow flag have been published today. These simple visual cues help you navigate your way down the page, until you decide you’re done and there’s nothing more to see.

I’ve also included “Top Stories” articles on the first page. These come from the NYTimes Home Page feed. This way, you still get a taste of what the NYTimes feels is important today. So now we’ve flipped the balance of power, the main content is personalized, and the sidebar is editor-driven. I think I like it better this way.

The concept is very simple and can be extended in any number of ways.

• The categories are all feeds from the NYTimes (pulled from their OPML file, though, inexplicably, not ALL their feeds are in that file). The feeds could come from any number of sources.
• The displayed content is very limited, with better data in the feed, you’d have more options for how to display it
• I wanted to use Thickbox to display the article in an iframe on the page, but NYT uses an iframe breakout script. Bah, no fun at all.

There’s nothing particularly revolutionary here. You can certainly add each feed to your newsreader and get the same effect (without the css elements of course). But there’s something compelling to me about reconstituting all this RSS data back into a Web page that’s been customized just for me.

If you follow 37Signals blog, you’ve already seen this, but I just had to jot something down on this. This NYTimes interactive graphic showing how we voted in the Democratic primary is brilliantly executed.

It almost completely ignores M$ chartjunk, and instead focuses on states as blocks, which move according to the percentage of people who voted for Clinton or Obama. The descriptive labels (hover over a state block) are written in plain English.

Best of all, they have used paging arrows and some animation to tell a story, simply by the ordering of each demographic segment in the paging: men to women to blacks, incomes levels, education levels.

This is so much more compelling than dumping a massive spreadsheet of data on me. It’s not the full story, of course, but it creates a compelling introduction that may just spur me to investigate — and read more.