Where are the standards?
If there is one thing that really bothers me about a lot of Web sites (not just journalism ones) is the lack of standards — as in standards-compliant code. As much as I like what The Washington Post does, I really don’t understand its over reliance on Flash, especially for navigational parts of its Web site.
ESPN is another prime offender, but it’s worse at espn.com because they use so much flash and video that it bogs down Web browsers and makes for a slow experience for many users. And nothing is worse than when I go to their site early in the morning and hear one of those screaming video commercials play unsolicited.
If ESPN didn’t have awesome content, I wouldn’t go there. I can’t take their slow Web site some days, but the site shows that content is king because I keep coming back.
The same effects that the Post and ESPN use could be achieved with Ajax. Why does it matter? Well, not everyone has Flash, Flash is a property of one company and it’s not forward thinking.
Mobile browsing may be the future of the Web. The iPhone is the first real mobile browsing experience, with a full-featured browser (standard compliant to boot) and large screen. Well, it only supports standards-based Web design. That means no Flash or Java.
Apple has good reasons for not supporting either, for various reasons.
Yes, some Smart Phones do support Flash Lite, but it’s nothing like the Flash that home computers have. Don’t rely on one product and one company for important parts of a Web site. The point is, Flash is a poor choice for the back bone of a site or any navigational element.
Flash is at home with multimedia content.
Web 3.0 from the BBC
The BBC has long had some of the best journalism content in the world. When I interviewed people in 2006 for my honors thesis, most people considered BBC News to be the best news Web site in the world. Well, it has stagnated a bit since then, and I would say it has fallen behind a few other players.
BBC is now making a push to reposition itself again as one of the top dogs.
Highfield said that after web 1.0 and web 2.0, he is looking at web 3.0 – the world of the semantic web, the internet that is intelligent.
25,000 user visits in just seven days, 400 reader comments … these were some of the results when 22 Danish online journalism students set up a website dedicated to covering the home town soccer team.
The class used a Word Press blog to create a Web site that would use all of the skills they had learned that year — round-the-clock online coverage, still photos, audio, video, multimedia features with comments on every story — to cover a local professional soccer team.
Every journalism school should have a class where students do a project like this. Not only did the students learn a lot about new media, but they also provided a real service to the community.
