perfessor multigeek's Journal: So when will online formats match online production?

So back in the day, all these folks came out with web content sites of one sort or another. Online magazines, what we now call blogs, comics, and so on. And damn near all of them built their UIs around a structure that assumed that a neatly matched unit of content, be it a journal entry, a movie review, comic strip, or item of medical advice, would be added to the system on a regular and frequent schedule, just like legacy print media.

New entry every Wednesday!
New comics monday through friday!
A new tip every week!

And, of course, it hasn't worked out like that.

The obvious reason is money. First folks thought that their little beanie baby fan site was going to make them rich. Hence the assumption of time being available to do such prolific and predictable content.
Then they thought that they wouldn't make any money at all as the equally clueless backlash hit. So most of them shut down entirely rather than "face the stress of having to do a new [content unit] every week." (How many of those letters have you read? I've read far too many.)

Now busy sites make a few bucks off print content, a few more off CafePress shwag, and some more off ads. So now they're trying AGAIN to do daily content, as if every form of entertainment or data needs to be formatted like a fucking soap opera.

And this odd, reasonless assumption warps the whole field. "Oh, I could never do a podcast, 'cause some weeks I'm just too busy." "I stopped writing in my blog because I kept missing days."

WT-ever-living-F!!!

THIS ISN'T GRADE SCHOOL, FOLKS. There's no teacher behind you with a ruler to punish you if you don't "turn your work in on time". And while plenty of people will drift off if they can't get a new fix every day or week or whatever, they will come back if you offer some other means of access to what you create.

So, what is he really on about this time, you'e wondering, because surely it's not some broadly distributed sense of sympathy for content providers, let alone a concern that there's not enough being generated.

How very perceptive of you. What I'm on about, gentle (yeah, right) reader, is formatting and procedures. Why is it that the vast majority of online content, from podcasts to Homestar Runner to Sinfest, act as if all that really matters is "this [weeks/days] [item]" with some itty-bitty grudging link to some pathetically ill-sorted archive? Even the goddamned media giants like the New York Times still assume that sorting by date created is the One True Faith of content management.

Are bookstores filed by date? No, they are not. Are movie theatre listings done by date? No, they are not. Are libraries or music stores or any goddamn media outlet worth a moment's attention sorted by date? No, they are not.

They are sorted by subject. They are sorted by author. Because that's how people choose most of their frickin' content.

Do I feel like a prophet in the wilderness after having been pushing this since the early nineties? Yes, I do. And every time I have to do a search to find an article on a site (/., anybody?) that generates thousands of articles a week, I get annoyed all over again. I think that it's safe to say that XML is workable by now. Electronic, automated sorting by keyword is over thirty years old. And I damn well hope that someday the great big world out there wil begin to get a clue.

I'm out,

-Rustin

Someday...

[sootman]

Well, maybe someday tags [slashdot.org] will be fully operational and Slashdot will become more useful. Hell, maybe someday they'll revamp their topics [slashdot.org] and go back to identifying them by names instead of numbers. I for one *hate* looking at a story, mousing over one of the topic icons to see what it is, and getting a number. I still haven't broken that habit. That could probably be fixed with a greasemonkey extension, but I use Safari, so oh well.

/. tags

[perfessor multigeek]

Oh, yeah. Tag me, baby!

As I've said a few times around /., I think that this whole tagging thing is great, both in concept and in how fluid and collaborative the execution has been so far. I've done my best to add good tags when given the chance and would love to see it build.

Now if only the fifty or so other sites I go to would do the same.

But keep in mind, even if tags get implemented, the UIs in general and front pages in specific focus almost entirely on whatever is newest. As I build my new site [perfessormultigeek.com], I'm h