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Saturday, February 9, 2002
Say how? 
| | Dan explains more about the broken link problem, and points to an explanation by Karl Martino, who disclaims that he does not speak for The Company. But he does deserve a bravo for his courage in trying to make sense of it all. He's writing from the trenches and he's clearly a no-bullshit guy. |
| | So okay. What's done is done. Now my only question is about the larger meaning of this disclaimer on the Dave Barry archive page: |
| | The recent redesign of Miami.com and Broward.com does not allow us to post more than three months of past columns by Herald Columnist Dave Barry. Please excuse the inconvenience. |
| | That sounds to me like something systematic. If it is, it risks relegating other columnists to the scrollery. If it's something else, like local licensing or policy, we need to know the situation is limited to Dave Barry and not system-wide. |
Say where?
| | Since the Miami Herald (home of Dave) is now subsumed under Miami.com, and the San Jose Mercury News (home of Dan) under BayArea.com, I'm assuming the new design perpetrator is RealCities. And I'm wondering... who are they? |
| | The site's About page only lists "Our Affiliates," the first of which is KnightRidder Digital. The rest are other publishing and broadcasting concerns. Click the About page link here and you get a list of "Regional Hub Sites" under the headline "Advertising Solutions." |
| | If you seek answers on the Partner With Us page, you still don't get a clue about identity, but you do get plenty about purpose, which is almost entirely about cross-promotion, marketing and advertising. Oh, and "exchange of content and technology." Journalism? Nowhere in sight. |
| | Knight Ridder Digital's goal is to exceed the immediate and future needs of its customers ‹ both new online users and Internet-savvy ones ‹ and its local and national advertisers. The company is working aggressively with leading Internet technology and service providers to keep its offerings on the cutting edge. |
| | The problem is, you can't exceed future needs if you're busy breaking faith with existing ones. |
| | Here's what I want to know, regardless of who has the answer: |
| | Are the old archives still around? |
| | If they are, there is no reason on Earth why they should't be brought back, even if they have new URLs. |
Blogrollerball
| | Just discovered a nice piece on blogs by Debbie Weil at ClicZ Today. She has some kinds words about this blog here (and Cluetrain too), and of couse I'm returning the favor. Reciprocity happens. Hey, here's a Blogrolling Law: |
| | For every link there is an equal and apposite backlink. |
Rotten linkage
| | - For a lot of people, including the designers of Knight-Ridder's new regional sites, and Dan's complaining readers, what matters most is design. Type faces and sizes, load times, layout, navigation...
- Link rot matters, but it's secondary.
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| | Briefly, here was my point: What they did to Barry, and to Dan, was blast tens of thousands of links into a fine mist of 404s. |
| | It's easy to see why: They saw no way the new directory schema could accomodate the old one, so they discarded the old one and everything in it. Okay, so far, so bad. Happens all the time. But then they also did something that reveals a transcendant cluelessness that desperately needs correction: they made it so archives scroll to oblivion after three months. |
| | So I want to make my own position clear here: |
| | Links are fundamental to writing and publishing on the Web. |
| | Writing for the Web without linking is like eating without digesting. It's literary bulemia. |
| | Disrespecting the links others have made to your work is irresponsible to their good intentions and disrespectful to your own authority as a source. It says fuck-you to the world and to your own ass. |
| | It shoud be obvious that 404s stink. I suggest we should start making it clear, whenever the subject of a "redesign" comes up, that the first concern should be maintaining the integrity of inbound links. |
| | I'm sure that's hard. But doing it doesn't break the Web, and it respects the readers and writers who — linked together — make the Web worthwhile. |
Dying air
| | I was jazzed to hear that Jim McKay would be loaned by ABC to NBC to help host the Olympics. But it was clear from the opening moments that he's been struck hard by the infirmaties of aging. He stumbled without stopping, like that skier in the old "agony of defeat" footage. Katie Couric and Bob Costas kept their cool, but McKay's live failings got the whole show off to a glitchy start it wouldn't shake for the duration. There were bad cuts, mikes left on when they shoudn't have been... But mostly, I think, everybody felt bad for the old man. |
Wow
The cumulative effects of advertising
| | About 150% of the advertising on the Olympics seems to be for cars. All the cars go fast through the desert and across the snow. Someday they'll all be troublesome junk. My car has already achieved that state, so the sell job isn't working on me. In fact, the more car advertising I see, the less motivated I am to dump my old car, which is even older than it was when I started complaining about it publicly. |
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