What bothers me most about the NYT charging for its News Tracker program is that they’re making their customers pay for for easier accessibility to content — not the content itself.

By discontinuing to freely send out emails alerting their interested, opt-in audience with content the audience has identified as important, they’re disregarding a significant potential they could tap, eventually leading to paid subscriptions or other services (except for the small fraction that will pay the $19.95/year for the service).

Instead, they should continue to take advantage of their readers’ interest and willingness to accept e-mails — these emails, serving valuable functions to the users, also serve an even more important marketing function for the NYT company. I’m not going to (happily) accept emails from the NYT that are soley advertising spam. However, I will glady accept an e-mail telling me there’s content on the site I’ve identified as important to me that may be wrapped in other marketing messages. They’re not seeing the value of these e-mailing features to the overall company.

Charging for secondary accessibility features, rather than the primary content, doesn’t make sense. After I stop receiving News Tracker e-mails, I’ll visit the NYT that much less resulting in less ad revenue for the site, less visibility of their new features and services, and less resonance in their brand overall.

The NY Times is squeezing money from every nook and cranny of its website. After shutting off permanent links several weeks ago (which has surely hurt their rate of incoming links), I just received an email from them. It reads in part:

Times News Tracker has been such a hit with loyal users like yourself that we’ve been working hard to build new enhancements to make keeping in touch with your world even easier. But providing this valuable service to our readers requires time and resources so we’ve made the hard decision to convert Times News Tracker to a subscription service.

So now if I want to have daily emails sent to me with keywords “Seattle”, “Nebraska” or “Portugal” I have to shell out $19.95/year. This, with absolutely no discounts for regular daily paper subscribers! Pbfft.

As this nation’s newspaper of record, the NYT’s significance on the web is diminishing as they continue to put up more fee boundaries around their content.

In response to my email stating that I would never pay for online services when I’m already shelling out $30+/month for the printed paper, the NYT writes back:

NYTimes.com is part of a different division than The Times newspaper, and each division manages its own products and is responsible for its own revenue. At this time we are not able to offer combined print and online discounts, but will continue to explore these types of offers. News Tracker is a valuable service that requires staffing time and resources. After significant research and user polling, we decided to enhance the service and charge for it.

Oh, a part of a different division, so obviously the services and fees simply cannot be integrated for the same content. Pbfft. They obviously haven’t studied the user experience here.. why would someone pay for the same content twice? The web site, as a mostly free service, should compliment the printed paper, promote the brand (unbiased, authoratative, accurate (minus Jayson Blair), comprehensive, trusted), and not try to be a money-making entity itself. I came to the printed paper through the online edition as it was just getting off the ground. Others, too, buy the printed paper after clicking on links sent through email and referenced on web sites. The incentives to link to NYT content are dwindling since the links will be broken (or rather, require a fee three times the cost of a daily paper) just days after being published. As Dave Winer observes, they’re losing web market share while they figure all of this out.

My, what a three day weekend away from electricity can do for a guy.

Today is the last day to cast votes for the Webby Awards People’s Voice. Nominees that I care about include: Moveable Type for Best Practices, Romenesko for News, and Netflix for Services (even though they could offer more features).

Not that I generally care much about awards, but the site I work for was actually invited to the first annual Webby Business Awards later this year.

Last night I went to the Crocodile to see Hello From Waveland. During the beginning of their set, four 50-something couples, the men dressed in beige blazers, the women dressed in nice evening clothes, walked in, lit up smokes and started shaking their hips. I realized they weren’t from around here when one approached the bar and said, “Two beer. How much?”

Their otherness stood out like a turd in a punchbowl — their attire, their age, their sophistication, mostly their comfortableness with all this distance. I heard later they were Spanish, and their chain smoking confirmed it. Did they read about the Crocodile in a tourism book as somewhere young, hip and not-to-miss? I couldn’t stop watching them — they were having fun — they watched the entire set and took pictures of themselves dancing and gesturing in front of the band. I found myself culturally jealous. The members of my Seattle culture were dressed in black with arms crossed wearing self-conscious scowls on their pale faces. The Spaniards were there to have fun.

Here is an example of the vast online infrastructure the northwest has in its regional and local government: the Seattle Department of Transportation has a pothole repair page on its web site. Word on the street (yuk, yuk) says that after filing a report, potholes are often fixed the very next day.

In the spirit of other geek résumés:

• 1981 - First computer, a TI-99/4A. I immediately started entering BASIC programs from magazines and writing my own. One rule — I had to “wash my hands” before using it.
• 1982 - Went to my first TI-99 user group. Boy, the early 80’s computing community.. talk about geekfest. At least my excuse was being nine.
• 1983 - Watched Wargames and was inspired.
• 1984 - Dad brought home our first household Intel-based computer, a Compaq “Portable” Plus 8086, larger and heavier than most sewing machines, with a six inch green screen and a 10 MB hard drive.
• 1985 - In junior high computer classes in front of the TRS-80, I RULED.
• 1986 - Started using local Omaha BBS’s for email, file exchange, and even chatting on multi-line BBS’s. Citinet, The Crypt, Mages Inn.
• 1988 - Debuted a BBS called FAST (on a 1200 baud modem).
• 1989 - Went to some BBS-centered gatherings at Perkins. Mostly awed by the geekdom, but also met some of the best friends that I’ve ever had. Jen, Ed, Chris.
• 1990 - Disciplined for stealing my teacher’s password, logging in and sending broadcast messages to my friends as him.
• 1991 - I started using the Internet (still before Mosaic was released) at UNO, in the Gateway newsroom in the dark afterhours on large black and white Mac displays, with Ed. We emailed, posted to newsgroups, chatted (with Unix ‘talk’), FTP’d, used Photoshop 2.0 to scan and distort photos, played computer games (eventually Marathon) and ate pizza until the early morning hours.
• 1992 - Got a used 386, Windows 3.1 capable machine for $300. I could finally multitask (other than through some hacked way like Borland’s Sidekick), and no more command line.
• 1993 - Posted to newsgroups about VW’s and drugs.
• 1994 - Went on a 7000 mile road trip around western North America with Ed, visiting and staying with more than a dozen people we’d corresponded with online via newsgroups and the sito community. The Internet was still safe in 1994.
• 1995 - Luddite phase. No new developments. Except to learn that technological progress is inevitable, and that there are many important limitations to the Internet, namely, eye contact.
• 1996 - Upgraded the 386 to a 486 and Windows 95. I could finally surf the web from home.
• 1997 - With a newly minted English degree (and art minor), I needed to find a job. Went back to Ed to learn the basics of HTML. I wrote down about 10 tags on a sheet of paper, then went home and dissected dozens of web sites. Started working for a computing magazine doing HTML work.
• 1998 - Got a job as a web designer at a design studio.
• 1999 - First dot-com.
• 2000 - Second dot-com.
• 2001 - Third dot-com.
• 2002 - Married a woman I first communicated with online three years previously.
• 2003 - Started a blog.

In Rem Readings the NY Times talks about Seattle’s distrust of the new Rem Koolhaas design for the Seattle Public Library.

Much of the library backlash can be attributed to the fear of being conned by big-city hucksters. This isn’t just xenophobia. People in Seattle have reason to feel crabby about buildings designed by famous architects. Twelve years ago, we got Robert Venturi’s dull — yet impossible to navigate — Seattle Art Museum, dominated by a gigantic staircase to nowhere. Its massive facade inspired a general yawn. In 2000, Frank Gehry gave us the garishly colored, extravagantly crumpled and disarmingly silly Experience Music Project.

There is a feeling that big city architecture doesn’t belong here, especially since we’re not offered the signature buildings, but the stylized, paycheck-generating derivatives. The Space Needle is uniquely Seattle, but the EMP is not quite as impressive as Gehry’s museum in Bilboa—always compared to the architect’s more popular previous work.

Rem’s library seems different and I hope that it is. He certainly breaks new ground in his manifestos about architecture. I have followed his books and other writing about place, process, globalization and media with much greater interest. The NY Prada sotre was his answer to the realization that most public space was retail space—why weren’t high-profile projects going on there? But few of these manifestos have been turned into architecture, and fewer still have been seen as successes.

Rem has achieved pop-architecture status without creating memorable buildings. So with the Seattle Public Library, there is a chance that both the architect and the city can achieve architectural significance come next year when the library opens.

After finishing a round of usability tests I was interested to read Jakob Nielsen article today, Convincing Clients to Pay for Usability. Particularly interesting was how to handle the question, if you’re a competent designer, why can’t you create a functional web site without having to test it?

Nielsen then lists these analogies, professionals who require (by law or common sense) their work to be tested before public release:

• Software engineers have a test team to catch bugs
• Architects have structural engineers to test their designs, design models for review, computer generated walk-throughs
• Writer have editors to catch grammatical mistakes and structural pitfalls

These projects have a design and test phase in their life cycle. Depending on the type of product, the testing comes either before, after, or during the build phase, whichever will cause the least pain if the design needs to change. With virtually any product, a prototype is built and tested on a sample audience.

Other analogies from the top of my head:

• Advertisers conduct vast market research on the client’s target audience before launching large campaigns
• Biologists go through daunting clinical trials before releasing treatments to the public
• Automobile makers conduct crash tests to reinforce safety in their brands and avoid lawsuits.

Sure, no one will die if the UI doesn’t work, but lack of sufficient testing causing a product recall (called a redesign in the web world) is just as financially devastating and can cause months of perceived online stagnation to customers.

In certain rare cases, design can be a life or death issue. I used to work with some of the original engineers of Microsoft Access. On a customer visit to a government contractor, they were shown how Access was used for the launch sequences of nuclear submarines, each advancing page of the sequence one step closer to nuclear holocaust. Who knows what bugs were lurking in the code—maybe MySQL would have been a better choice?

Today I viewed Contact Sheet on a Mac. Oops. The experience was much like noticing that my zipper was down for the last two months—the site’s broken all over the friggin’ place.

Since the company I work for builds client software largely for Windows and Linux, I’d gotten out of the habit of checking my work on a Mac. I was long overdo in firing up the G4.

My half-baked idea of swapping out stylesheets to change themes was largely the root of the problem (although no doubt it was broken before). Using the different colored nav images as backgounds worked on paper, but not on all the current browsers. So I’ll have to hardcode the nav images and if I want to swap themes, write some scripty thing to do the html swapping, or just change directories or some other fancy wizardry. But it won’t be as easy as swapping one line of the CSS.

Which, since the bandwidth issue, I’ve decided to rotate themes on a weekly or monthly basis and take advantage of that CSS and GIF caching.

Updates soon, and enough talk about this site.

One of the common pro-CSS arguments is that XHTML/CSS designed web sites save bandwidth since the designs don’t contain repeated use of tables, spacer gifs and other tricks to tweak layout.

So I thought it interesting that since I moved more in that direction* and also started rotating stylesheets on a daily basis, I’ve seen my bandwidth usage skyrocket per page view. Previously the bandwidth had been ~10KB/page. I started with a new CSS and it shot up to 14KB on Tuesday, then yesterday to 87KB!

This is what I have gathered:

1. Some of the increase is due to bulkier pages in general. I expanded the number of articles displayed from 10 to 15, making the index.html 8KB larger. I replaced a lightweight version of the header with the full-blown CSS c-clamp on the popular telephone pages, and the header graphic yesterday was also on the fat side at 12KB.
2. Users have to load the CSS and GIF set anew each day.
3. Users to most blogs, including this one, regularly only view one page each day, the homepage. The bandwidth savings of CSS/XHTML are thinner in these cases since you’re not benefitting from the .css being cached on subsequent pages per visit.

As an experiment I put the rotation on hold. Today, without changing a thing, the average is back down to 24KB (today’s index.html is 22KB), presumeably because yesterday’s .css and .gifs are cached in many users’ browsers. The bad news, to continue rotating the stylesheets will continue to eat up bandwidth until each theme is rotated back in again. But I’m ok with it if my service provider is.

*still nowhere near compliant, and fine with it.

French’s Mustard is in a conundrum. It’s listed on as an ok-to-purchase product on the French Boycott Watch page, for those participating in the ridiculous boycott, since it’s made in Rochester, NY. However, French’s makes no mention of it on their own website. What could be worse — identifying themselves as a “made in USA” product in these blindly patriotic times, or dilluting their marketing efforts by not really being French?

But we all know the U.S. has more to lose than anyone if we start playing this idiotic game of isolationism.

The lunacy:

After a Bush adviser last month said her husband [Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry] looked French, Ms. Heinz Kerry, who speaks five languages, made news by sneering that the president’s advisers “probably don’t even speak French.”

She said on Friday that she thought any damage from her remarks was minor.

The Seattle Times claims that their circulation lead over the Seattle Post-Intelligencer grew in the last year.

Does this include the free six-days-a-week newspapers they’ve been sending to our house for the past few months? Or is this to further their money-losing scheme so they can get out of the joint operating agreement with rival Seattle Post-Intelligencer?

I changed the site’s clothes.

But I can easily go back to the previous getup by editing one line of one file, thanks to CSS. Now all I need to do is set up a cron job to rotate skins every day. Since digging deeper into CSS a few weeks ago, all I see are advantages. As long as you’re willing to forgo the slim slice of pie that still enjoys their Netscape 3 browsers, that is. Previously I used CSS for common font styles but rarely anything more. Now I’m taking it on the job, and everywhere else.

Although not XHTML compliant (I’ll bet) I’ll continue to experiment with this site’s layout in the coming weeks to find out exactly what can be done. I’m still fond of tables and am not ashamed to use them. But now I don’t have to go six tables deep to get the right spacing. Oh what fun.

I purchased Reinventing the Wheel after flipping through the book at Elliot Bay Bookstore. I’m a sucker for these kinds of niche retro-design books, and this one offers a narrow slice of design history through the rotating wheel chart. Makes me want to create new wheels for everything — a color-coded wheel chart for all of my “outfits” (a la Geranimals), a kilograms-to-pounds converter (for that European bathroom scale), dot-com wheel-o-facts…

Even though the book is about the collection and you don’t even notice the written comments in your first eight flip-throughs of the book (at least from the graphic design point of view), author and collector Jessica Helfand does an excellent job of organizing and describing the pieces from their ancient astrological beginnings to 50’s pop kitch.

Just as the Seattle International Film Festival announces their roster of films for the 2003 festival (oooo), I have catalogued my entire 16mm Film Collection so we can start viewings at CS HQ.

My prizes, of course, are the feature length films, of which I have seven beautiful classic prints (ok, one’s a hokey western, but cooly kitch). That, and a few odd Woody Allen TV appearances and some great ’70s television commercials. Also an early documentary (which was often staged, and extremely condescending) by Luis Buñuel, copies of the first motion pictures ever by Louis Lumière. More local to the northwest, I have movies about the explosion and aftermath of Mt. St. Helens, including one 16mm home movie recording of an ascent of the volcano as it was bulging, days before it exploded. And dozens of documentaries and educational films.

The best things about 16mm

1. I love 16mm because it’s clunky and beautiful. The actual light passing through celluloid, projected on a screen.. there’s no digital presentation that comes close to that kind of sensational image.
2. The colors.
3. You’re watching a real movie.
4. It’s low-tech. You can get a projector for < $25 on ebay.
5. Blockbuster has nothing like it.

The worst things about 16mm

1. You can’t fall asleep on the couch while watching movies (you have to get up to change reels every 45 minutes, and it’s a rude awakening when you let the film run to the end of the reel).
2. They eventually wear out, fade, turn to vinegar.
3. Of course there’s the noise. The constanst ch-ch-ch-ch of the frames chattering by is nauseating without a soundbox (which I have none), but you eventually learn to love it.
4. You can’t get much after the early 1980’s.
5. As my good friend CV says, “It’s extremely addictive. Worse than heroin.”

Jeffrey Zeldman talked about art direction vs. design last week, and mentioned something that’s been on my mind for a long time. I’ll quote him at length:

Many design curricula encourage their students to develop a unique visual vocabulary (a style) that can be grafted onto any real-world project, regardless of its audience or message. Most superstars of print or web design have followed that advice. Their work is about their sensibility, not about the product or service. It communicates, at most, that the product or service is cool or edgy.

Design no longer serves the product; the product serves the design. The product is merely a vehicle allowing the designer to express his vision. Thus design becomes a commodified version of fine art (and practically the only version of fine art that pays).

Zeldman lays out an accurate analysis of the current state of web design — look at the web design award winners — the sites are usually highly attractive, stylized, unusable sites, where the potential empowerment of the target audience is usurped as a monument to the designer.

Why, then, is successful art direction hard to find on web sites while stylized self-indulgence appears everywhere?

Obviously, the web as a medium must be utilitarian — you can’t turn the physical pages with your hands, so the UI must be omnipresent. Since standard HTML UI is considered ugly (and displayed differently by each OS and browser), or blue underlined links are inconvenient for a particular design (guilty as charged), the UI is invented uniquely by every web designer out there. And as with any physical product from toothbrushes to sneakers, the design is stylized, ideally, but not commonly, as a continuation of the brand.

The UI makes up most of the visual information that a visitor sees. That’s why web designer is commonplace while web art director is not. Magazine sites can’t fill their index pages with cover images (i.e., traditional art direction) because if people can’t immediately find the table of contents on the web, they’ll go somewhere else. So the role of art direction on the web becomes subordinate — the art direction is in the subsidiary editorial artwork — there are no full spreads.

Even sites that display some degree of art direction in their content (like Salon, Slate and Jugglezine), the UI design still visually defines the site, however subtle or overpowering it may be.

But this is getting beside the point. Because the medium doesn’t allow obvious opportunities for art direction doesn’t mean web sites must be exploited agents for the designers’ commodified fine art. Art direction on the web is about matching appropriate UI style with the brand, setting tone and enforcing consistency across microsites and ad hoc digital media, working with the designer to balance usable functionality and accessibility of content for the end user (no extra plug-ins necessary).

And as with any product from toothbrushes to sneakers, everyone involved must observe the target audience using the site and make changes accordingly. If sites achieve these goals and are still nice to look at, the web will have come a long way.

This note to self found in a San Jose cubicle when looking for scratch paper.

The Art of Explanation from Poynter Online is a collection of published news illustrations and notes of the newsroom conversations that took place during the creation of war-related graphics. The visual journalists detail the strategy and process behind their illustrations—an interesting look into the thought processes behind this visual side of the news.

A German illustrator who submitted his graphic How Much US Weapons Cost is forward about his feelings for the Iraq war and talks about some graphics, such as Saddam’s bunker, which are purely speculative.

A Spanish graphic artist for El Correo describes his team’s illustration of combat over a bridge in Iraq:
We’re trying to avoid the “Map and arrows and flying around planes” formula and trying to create graphics that tell stories to our readers.