I think it’s a mistake to think that we’ve “figured everything out” with respect to presenting content on the Web. The content, readers, platforms, contexts are so slippery that there really isn’t one best approach — there’s several. It all depends on your point of view.

SimplerTimes was designed to show me what I was missing throughout the day, creating “light reads” of the NYTimes to accompany my more substantial read every morning. The NYTimes is such a great paper that I was annoyed, knowing that I was missing great articles that I didn’t have time to dig around for.

Now the beauty of RSS is that it flattens out all the complexity inherent in the content. Everything I need is there, from any source, in one format. This frees me to think about other things, like how to customize the display of content.

Because hardware (and software) are so cheap, it’s really no big deal to set up a new app to vaccuum up RSS and repurpose it in new ways. It’s very light weight, you don’t have to store everything in perpetuity (SimplerTimes stores items for 30 days, then deletes them).

For most internal projects, it doesn’t make any sense to go from DB -> RSS -> DB, but once your infrastructure gets the least bit complex, or you’re dealing with multiple sites, it just might be the answer to keeping things simple and allowing you to focus on your ideas.

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.

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.

Usually, all the department heads get together and have a meeting about the signup process, and it turns into a brainstorming session about how best to pimp out your prospective user. Ironically, this process is made all the easier since, most times, you don’t have any users yet, and abstract constructs receive this kind of abuse quite well.

Signup is a very delicate time. You are trying to cajole passers-by into entering your little world. They don’t know your world or fully understand its benefits. The best way to show them is to let them in as quickly and as easily as possible.

We also make a grave mistake in our terms. This new person is not a “member.” Filling out a form doesn’t make you a member of a community. Your actions and contributions make you a member. So, maybe we call this person a rookie. And rookies need to be handled carefully and watched. Most good communities integrate concepts of user-levels, where more experienced members are granted more access and control. This is completely appropriate if your goal is to build a vibrant community.

These experienced members dominate your community and should be the ones you focus your attentions on. They are the ones you want to know about. Not the rookies. They haven’t proven themselves yet, and might not even stay around for very long.

As SMITH grows, we have plans to build out the profiles & community spaces, so we can integrate newsletters, geographic functions, etc. But that’s all stuff that will benefit our active members, not the rookies, so we took it out of the sign-up process. Adding extra fields for marketing would only muddy our core message (”share your story with us”).

If it doesn’t apply to the core selling proposition, then it doesn’t belong in the sign-up. There’s lots of ways to hint, prod, remind people to fill in their profiles as they continue to return to your site. And frankly, it’s going to take some time for new members to really understand the benefits that additional information might provide.

So we are taking it slow, and I think the approach is really working well. Our sign-ups have really exploded since we launched the new site.

In November of 2006, we ran a six-word memoir contest with messaging startup Twitter. The more than 12,000 entries we received led to the book, Not Quite What I Was Planning, published in February 2008 by HarperPerennial.

In advance of the book, we created a promotional video that actually helped a great deal in selling a product that didn’t fully exist yet.

Then we embarked on a complete rebuild of the Web site. We really worked hard to deliver on SMITH’s core mission: everyone has a story, and SMITH is the place to tell it. It was a difficult task, blending editor-driven and community-driven content, but I think we’ve gotten pretty far. Part of the difficulty is in activating a formerly passive audience: they came to SMITH to read great stories, not add their own.

XOXO.com, a company run by our friend Ben Brown, developed the simple community tools we use on SMITH. One of the most important things we are able to do now is to integrate story submissions and member signups. It’s all one simple step now, and that’s really helping spur the growth of the site.

Spent the afternoon dealing with this. Argh.

I had to upload the preview video for our book to a bunch of sites today. I had a huge list, but most of them are for boys, and nowhere in our video does anyone get kicked in the nuts.

Vimeo is where I originally uploaded the video. I love this site. Simple, effective and high quality. You’ll notice that most people wanting high quality go here (at least I notice that). You can reupload a video in case you need to make a change, plus set a custom thumbnail for your video.

Youtube is easy and probably the 2nd best overall experience. Of course, I already had an account there, so that’s maybe an unfair comparsion. But then again, it’s been years since Web site registration was invented. You’d think it’d be a slam-dunk by now. No reuploading or custom thumbnails on Youtube.

MSN Video. Oh. My. God. Probably the poster child for how NOT to use Ajax. Reload the page and you’re magically transported back to the homepage. And the signup? Seriously, they told me to print out documents and sign them. WTF?! Plus, the site looks like a bunch of lawyers took another lawyer who they didn’t like so much out to the parking garage, beat him to a pulp, and then smeared him all over a web page. It says a lot when teenagers’ MySpace pages look better than a Microsoft site. Lacks anything but basic text editing features. Pretty lackluster effort, IMO.

Yahoo Video. Oh Yahoo, I want to love you, but you’re just so damn boring. Perfectly functional experience here, but no context communicated through the design at all. I think it’s a perfect explanation of why the company is in the shitter. Who would want to hang out there? Also, the video conversion is taking forever. Ah, just got a look at it, and it looks like crap. Way to go, Yahoo. You make my video suck.

MySpace Video. Once I got through registration, it was pretty straightforward. Only basic editing features, but their player looks pretty good.

AOL Video. Man, it only took like 10 tries to get through the signup process. And then I had to download a VideoEgg widget, which would be fine if I were an expert user, but I’m not. Just give me a simple file upload and leave me be.

Also put the video onto Facebook, but it’s impossible to find. I think Facebook might just bury itself under its own weight.