Friday, under their “First Look Blog” the folk over at The New York Times Online went nuts and introduced a new “article skimmer.” As far as I can tell, they took the layout and concept of AllTop and added a blurb with an image. (Original!)
There will probably be ads among the articles. How will that affect the clean feel of it or the usefulness? What about user-generated homepages based on predetermined areas of interest? (A homepage with the top articles from Sports, World and Arts, for example.)
Many already have RSS readers or dynamic bookmarks to access the content they want while avoiding the ads and nonsense that typically comes with. Now The New York Times can manage (read: inject ads into) their own “feed.” The idea is already nearing ubiquitous so it’s boring but I still like it.
With improvements, and with varying versions for different applications, this could be big step away from a print-oriented business model (Front page, See [page], top content). Considering newspapers have had to resort to putting ads on the front page and above the fold, it’s about time.
To their credit, The New York Times has consistently been ahead of the curve with online projects. They opened up their online archives awhile back when they disabled pay accounts and they’ve put their fingers into quite a few social media pots.
One can only hope that their being early-adopters will help. They’ll need to attract enough readers to compensate for their current, too-perishable audience that’s discontinuing subscriptions because they’re grandchildren have started emailing them photos.
Update from previous post: Some have said, in so many words, “who cares?” to the TOS change within Facebook. Understandable. My point was they’ve made another of many mistakes. Their failure to notify users, their post-wreckage band-aide post, their arrogant grab of content and their complete defiance of the data portability flag they’ve wrapped themselves in is what’s outrageous. Not them doing it in the first place.
From a company so melodramatically moronic, it should have been expected. Zuckerberg and Co. have essentially told us to chill out, that they won’t use our content how we wouldn’t want, and we should trust them. When someone asks me to trust them (especially after proving themselves untrustworthy), I don’t.
Tags: rss, social tools