Good:

1. The site clearly continues the paper’s commitment to encouraging conversations and interaction between people who track what’s going on in the community. As I did in 2006, I commend them for this.
2. The abuse reporting system in the forum is more robust. As I understand it, if a particular comment is reported as “abusive” by three or more people, it will cease to appear in the conversation thread. In the past, users could report abuse but action had to be taken by an administrative user.
3. The system for recommending stories published on the site allows users to see what’s interesting to fellow readers.
4. With their new blogging system, any user can create a blog. While these user blogs aren’t featured like the ones maintained by the staff, they are a good platform for a kind of conversation that’s a little different from forum posts.
5. The use of customizable profile photos (or whatever image a user chooses) alongside posts gives the conversation the potential to feel a little more personalized and authentic than when there were none.

Bad:

1. The site is slower than snail snot, and it’s not just the server side of things. It appears to be using a ridiculously complex Javascript system for generating pages, and demands more client-side computing power than ever just to print some text and images out on a page. There’s Web 2.0, and then there’s UCK.
2. The new site continues and increases the trend of control by non-local Gannett Corporation staff who have no connection to our community that isn’t based on a profit motive. Locally-based Online Editor Jason Truitt has apparently less control over the site than ever.
3. In moving to the new system, the paper is apparently leaving behind all of the existing forum conversations. As unhelpful as most of them were, it’s bad form to just nuke years of posts (though they’re still available for the moment – ready your crawler bots) and expect people to invest in a new space that may be nuked just as easily.
4. With their new blogging system, any user can create a blog. I’ll just leave it at that.
5. There appear to be no e-mail notifications that you can receive if you want to follow the conversations around a particular story or discussion thread.
6. Related, the site makes pretty poor use of RSS feeds when it could have done so much more (though they do seem to be updated in a more timely manner).
7. The site navigation is weird and seizure-inducing. Key menus appear and disappear, key content sections change without warning, and I think there are at least seventeen gazillion links you can click on at any given page. Okay, I counted, it’s 222 links for the front page…who the heck has the time?
8. By virtue of being slow, hard to use, and utterly confusing, the site offers less value for Palladium-Item advertisers. To whatever degree their focus has been shifting to an online presence that replaces traditional revenue sources for print media, this has got to be a big step back.

So, on the whole, I’d give it a big thumbs down.

The update has got to be frustrating for the local Pal-Item staff. It seems like some over-zealous Javascript jockeys must have known someone who knew someone at Gannett headquarters, and were awarded a big fat contract for updating the websites of this and other media properties (apparently this system is being rolled out at other papers around the country) with a bunch of pseudo-social networking features. Unfortunately, someone forgot to think about things like usability, good interface design, fostering true dialog, getting user input…you know, those kinds of things.

And so we remain a community where the presentation of local news, opinion and public conversation is increasingly managed and dictated by people who have never been to Richmond, Indiana, and in a way that is less and less useful to those of us who are here.

Government registration forms, social services, accurate weather updates, financial filings, interactions with our representatives in Congress, the ability to watch political debates — all of these things are slowly (or sometimes quickly) moving toward a mode where if you don’t have good Internet access, you’re going to have to work a lot harder to get the information you want. For a significant population of people in the world who are almost always overlooked, this is a real problem, and one that is growing every day.

And it’s not just about the “digital divide.” I can’t figure out whether it’s a privilege or a curse that I’m often no more than a few minutes away from being able to look something up on the Internet. As I wrote in 2005, I also maintain some confidence that if the Internet went away today, things would be okay. But how long will that be true for most people? At what point will the inability to quickly and easily refer someone to your website for more information mean the total breakdown of society as we know it? Are we already there?

I still believe that websites and the Internet in general have a significant role to play in making our lives better, easier, and more about the things that matter. The way that information can be exchanged and displayed is unlike anything else available, and it’s a tool we can use for much good. But it’s so easy to forget what enormous resources it takes to make that possible – and what significant relative wealth one must have to take advantage of it.

I’ve been ignoring del.icio.us for a while now. I’ve seen little icons for it popping up on weblogs I read, seen references to it in articles on software and productivity (including one on my own company’s weblog), and heard people using it in everyday conversation. But I really didn’t understand it, or what it really did, or why anyone would use it. (Plus, it seems like a waste of a perfectly good domain name, icio.us.)

I’m still not sure I do, even after reading the site’s own description of what it’s for. This is a strange and disorienting place to be for someone whose job it is to have my finger on the pulse of web tech trends. But I’m trying out using it anway, and you can see my Chris Hardie del.icio.us page at http://del.icio.us/ChrisHardie. I guess it’s just a list of web pages I’ve marked for…me? people in my “network”? the world?…to see, with various keywords associated so that I can…have keywords. Ummm, yeah, I think that’s it. I kind of like it, but I don’t know why.

Do you use del.icio.us? How? Why?

RickThalls.com

I’ll start with the Rick Thalls campaign website, http://www.rickthalls.com/. The first thing I notice about Mr. Thalls` site is that the front page is over 900 Kilobytes in size. For someone on a dial-up connection, that’s a large download, perhaps prohibitively so for some users. The main reason for this is that Mr. Thalls displays images that are sized much larger than they are displayed, forcing you to download much more information than is actually used. For example, the “Please Vote Today” image currently on the front page is displayed at 532 pixles wide by 230 pixels high, but the actual image file is much larger, 1007 pixels wide by 436 pixels wide – a big no-no in web development.

The current front page also plays an audio clip every time you load it, with Rick welcoming you to the site. While it’s definitely an engaging use of “new media,” it can become annoying after one’s third and fourth visit to the site. Because it plays without prompting, it also holds the possibility of startling or embarrassing users who are viewing the site in a public or work setting and aren’t expecting the sound.

This is a comment that applies to both sites: I don’t understand the compulsion to put local weather information on a political campaign site. There are several hundred other places that I can get the weather in my daily routine, many of them on local websites – why do I need to have the weather listed so prominently here? It’s a waste of “screen real estate” and comes across as unnecessary filler. Thalls’ site continues that trend with a number of Flash-based games at the bottom of his front page. HUH?? I could almost see the utility if he had a “Kids Area” or something like that where the games were related to a policy statement, but in its current incarnation, the presence of a Pac-Man feature doesn’t say “serious political candidate.”

Once you start browsing around the site’s inner pages, you begin to see some of the things the site does well: it has a consistent “look and feel” (sorry, Mr. Hill). The colors are bold and inviting, and make the site visually pleasing. Games and weather report aside, the site doesn’t make excessive use of bells and whistles, annoying animations, or other tackiness. The site provides some basic useful information – Rick’s background, when and where to vote for him, and how you can help his campaign.

Perhaps my biggest disappointment with rickthalls.com is the total lack of detail about the candidate’s positions on issues and specific vision for what a Thalls administration would look like. As I believe he’s done in many of his other public writings and appearances, he mostly writes in vagaries and sweeping generalizations that make the site seem more about propaganda and less about educating voters. “The appropriate partnerships within the city will play a huge role in solving these problems”…what does that MEAN? “We must portray a professional image”….what does that LOOK like? “We must address new revenue options!”…what ARE they?

Lastly, the site does not appear to offer a way to contact the candidate directly with questions or comments about the campaign. This is a failure of the promise of using the Internet for better two-way contact between candidates and constituents.

Other things I noticed in my review:

• The site is hosted on the Linux operating system using the Apache web server software platform. The site is hosted via the GoDaddy.com, Inc. service, which isn’t local, but is widely known and cost effective.
• The page titles of the site that display in the web browser title bar are not page-specific. In other words, they all say about the same thing (“Elect Rick Thalls Mayor”) instead of something more precise like “Rick Thalls – As Your Mayor” and “Rick Thalls – Vote Today,” or something similar.
• The site does not have a privacy policy stating how they will use information submitted through the “Show Rick Your Support” form.
• The site does not validate to industry-recognized W3C standards, which means it may not be compatible with alternate web browsing platforms like devices for the visually impaired, people using text-only browsers, etc.
• The site does not offer any Spanish-language translation options for the city’s significant Spanish-speaking population

HuttonForMayor.com

The website for incumbent Sally Hutton is at HuttonForMayor.com, but really, this is the Mayor’s secondary campaign website. The primary one is the one belonging to the City of Richmond, and while I won’t go into a full critique of it right now, let’s just say that it probably doesn’t reflect very comprehensively on the Mayor’s administration to date – a missed opportunity for sure. But, moving on:

The front page weighs in at 177 Kilobytes, a fairly fast download for even slower connections, which is good. The site achieves a “graphical” look while still using style sheets and text to display the site’s critical content (e.g. “Sally Hutton for Mayor” at the top) instead of bulky graphics. This is good for search engine optimization and usability by non-graphical web browser programs.

Unfortunately, the design isn’t very compelling. A strange flag-like icon and some blocky header graphics don’t really draw the user in or convey a polished image. Certainly, once we cross into the area of design aesthetics there is much that is subjective, but I think even newer web users can recognize that the site design leaves much to be desired in terms of professionalism and atmosphere.

Like the Thalls site, the Hutton site provides some useful basic information about the candidate: history and background (including home address and phone number, which is good to see), past accomplishments and service to the community, etc. But the site also lacks any concrete information about the Mayor’s policy positions on key issues, or specific vision for what a second term in office might look like. If a voter came to this site hoping to educate themselves in making a decision, they would only have past-oriented information to act upon, a missed opportunity for sure.

The Mayor has a nice Flash-based photo gallery viewer on the site that shows her participation in various community events. Unlike the Thalls slideshow viewer, it doesn’t have any captions to describe what’s happening in the images.

The Mayor’s site does offer a site-wide search feature which is useful to have, although the site isn’t quite so big that one can’t find what one needs by clicking through it.

Other things I noticed:

• The site is hosted on the Linux operating system using the Apache web server software platform. The site is hosted via the Lunarpages.com hosting service, which isn’t local, but is widely known and cost effective.
• The site does not have a privacy policy stating how they will use information submitted through the “Volunteer” or “Contribute” forms.
• The Mayor makes her direct campaign e-mail address available front-and-center on the site’s splash page, which increases the sense of her availability.
• The site’s footer says it was last updated on September 29th, 2007. For a political campaign that wants to appear on top of the day’s current issues, it’s probably not a good idea to imply a month of no changes in the content.
• The site does not validate to industry-recognized W3C standards, which means it may not be compatible with alternate web browsing platforms like devices for the visually impaired, people using text-only browsers, etc.
• The site does not offer any Spanish-language translation options for the city’s significant Spanish-speaking population

Conclusions

If the election were held today and the sole criteria for voting was the quality and utility of the candidate websites…it would probably be too close to call. Both sites have their positive features, but both lack any substantial future-oriented information that voters can use to education themselves about what a Hutton or Thalls administration will specifically look like.

For me, the whole point of having a campaign website is to provide in-depth information that can’t be easily shared during a speech, debate, or passing conversation. If someone’s already at the site, they already know that you’re running for Mayor, and in this race in this town, they probably already know a lot of tidbits about you.

So, each candidate should have had detailed policy documents outlining their budget plans, economic development vision, environmental policy, governing model, staff structure, and more – and then they should have been referring to that information throughout the campaign. “For more information about exactly what I’ll do about issue X, you can go to my website…” They’ve elaborated somewhat in the pseudo-blog hosted by the local paper, but as election day draws near, that too seems to be more of a platform for quick sound bites and less for substantial presentation of information or dialogue.

If I were to be overly cynical about all of this, I could infer that neither the candidates nor the voting population think enough about the substance of ideas to bother with effectively using one of the best mediums available for exchanging that kind of information, the web. But, I suspect that what’s really at work is low standards and poor precedents for what kind of political web presence is necessary or desirable in a local election.

With that context in mind, both campaign websites are probably doing exactly what they set out to do, and as well as they set out to do it.

So I’m turning to tagging and tags, a fairly widespread component of many blogs these days. Basically, each post will be assigned a series of tags that help describe it, and they’ll be listed on the post page when you view it on my site (currently located in the right-hand column on each full post page). You can then click on a tag to see other posts that share that tag and are, presumably, related. For example, this post will have tags of “[tag]blog[/tag]“, “[tag]meta[/tag]“, “[tag]website_development[/tag]” and “[tag]blogging[/tag]“, and you can click on any of those to see other articles that share those tags.

I’ve also added a “tag cloud” to the navigation bar on the front page of my weblog, which shows the most often-used tags. A similar display is now present on the front page of my site. Soon, I will also add an index of sorts that identifies some themes in my writing, composed of groups of related tags. Eventually, I hope to fade out the use of the traditional category system.

Let me know if you find this useful, confusing, or something else entirely.

Thanks to the folks at PhilQuinnForCouncil.com for linking here so prominently on the site. Of course, as much as I like and admire Phil, please know that I have not (nor do I plan to) endorsed any local political candidates here. I do wish them all the best in fulfilling the promise of the democratic process.

If you haven’t already, you can head on over to GetWellJoe.com, a site I set up for Joe Augustin after he was assaulted earlier this week. The technical details are mundane compared to what Joe is going through, but it was a strange experience going from scratch to a full-blown weblog with hundreds of visitors and comments pouring in in a matter of an hour or two. Thanks to all the people who are holding Joe up now and keeping each other posted on his progress.

In a little bit, I’m heading out to IU East to help unveil the preview and website for the new documentary being produced here, 1:47. I’m at Summersault right now working with my team on the final prep for actually making the new site live, so you can check that out shortly. I haven’t gotten to do as much lately with video production as I would like, so it’s at least rewarding to be peripherally involved in a project where some really great production work is being done.

Have a good weekend.

I’ve seen Matt’s studio in Austin and I’m so impressed with the “handmade” nature of so much of what he does – music, carpentry and beyond. He’s quite a guy. You can check out his website (which I designed) at dancingcarpenter.com; you can order a copy of his album Imaginary Muses from there as well.

Hmmm, I wonder if we’re ready for that. There’s been some demand for it over time. On other community websites I’ve been involved in, it was quite a useful way for folks to connect, but that’s often over a geographical distance. I don’t want to make it any easier than it is to isolate ourselves from each other when we don’t need to be, but for those who might not have time or inclination to meet in person about the issues at hand, an online chat can sure be handy. We’ll see.

Part of it is probably the sense that I’d rather be spending time strengthening ties in my real-world community than in an online one. Another part is just not caring. But most importantly, it seems the trend is such that soon we’ll have one social networking site per each person with an Internet connection, and we’ll be back where we started. I’ve got enough passwords to remember as it is, okay?

But it is funny to me when the networking sites scrape information off of my website in an attempt to make me look like a member. Like Spoke, which just did this without asking. Unfortunately, they get some significant things wrong, e.g. listing Earlham College President Doug Bennett as the president of my company, Summersault. To be clear, Doug has not left his position as the president of an internationally known liberal arts college to serve as President of a website development firm.

If he is looking for that kind of position with us, we’re open to, um, networking with him…without the help of a website.

The site still needs a lot of work to make it more collaborative and relevant, but I’m excited about the possibilities. The greatest part of it is that anyone can add content to it (news, events, blog entries, etc.) so it’s not just about what I think of as progressive or know about going on. If you have comments or suggestions, send them my way!