Try entering http://www.badscience.net and having to scroll for miles to the actual content, selecting an article and having to scroll for miles for the actual article, then looking for a different article… (but you get the idea). Bear in mind that phones scroll a lot slower than the emulator applet. Of all the sites I use the browser for (bbc news – low graphics version, wikipedia, etc) bad science is by far the most painful. Perhaps you could follow your own advice and simplify the page? Or tweak your css a bit, put the miniblog after the articles? Even a sub-site would be preferable.

Of course bad science is worth the hassle (I used WAP even though it was shit) and I heartily agree with 1, 7 and 3 (I’m a big fan of the Guardian Wrap), but the main reason bad science is excused is for the introduction to ctrl+tab and bugmenot (why had no-one told me?!).

The “breaking news ticker” is an utter pain to use, when it was not before. (*Just* better than the BBC’s though).

As for online ads: yes, when I do see them, they rarely get my click.

The Observer recently ran a piece in which 50 writers were asked to nominate underrated novels (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2160520,00.html) .

Apart from acting as a plug for the 50 novels, this is pretty much worthless. It tells us nothing about how well known the books are, or a how highly regarded. Some may enjoy a brisk secondhand trade. Others may have been ahead of their time; there’s not much secondhand trade because those who own them won’t let them go. (At the risk of stating the obvious, library borrowings and secondhand sales don’t register with the publishing industry; the fact that a book is out of print tells us something about sales of new books but very little about readers’ preferences.)

If the Observer were to run an online survey (requiring, of course, registration to prevent electoral fraud), this would still tell us only about the preferences of readers who a) read the Observer, b) are willing to spend time online, and c) like participating in surveys. The respondents would not be representative of all British readers, no. But their responses would still be more informative than a one-off trawl of 50 writers.

Yes, some of them get paid per click, but I don’t (as a general principle) click on ads on pages anyway, so there’s little difference whether I’ve seen the ad or not.

Whether (on a pay per view basis) the hosting site still receives payment if it’s been automatically blocked, is a trickier question.

It depends where the blocking occurs and at what point in the process. One can easily imagine a browser plugin that allows the request to go out, but then doesn’t display the resulting image; this would mean the hosting site still got paid, as from the advertiser’s POV, the ad would still have been downloaded.

But one can just as easily imagine something that stops the request going out in the first place, meaning the ad never gets downloaded.

Unfortunately I have bugger-all idea how the various browsers, plugins, firewalls and proxies that do ad-blocking actually operate. Does anyone have more of a clue? I haven’t worked in the online media industry since well before ad blockers became commonplace.

Andrew.

I completely agree with your advice; good digital media offers the reader a different experience than print media, and readers expect publishers to take advantage of the opportunities digital media offer.

However, I am curious: what was the response of the “senior chaps” at the club? Did they understand the issues you want to address and how ?

(If they understood the technical aspects or not is actually less interesting. As long as they grasped why their readers will soon become ex-readers if they don’t do something about it, they will ensure that there is staff to manage the technology.)

Thank you Ben – it’s nice to be appreciated!

And don’t many advert agencies pay for click-through visits rather than for viewings?

Then again, I consider myself relatively immune to advertisements. But maybe that’s just two strikes against me.

Re. the original post, point 5 (unmediated expertise) is the big one for me. Between Bad Science, Language Log and a few others I dip into occasionally, I’ve pretty much entirely stopped bothering to buy newspapers. Or New Scientist for that matter.

With the notable exception of proper investigative journalism (why I still buy Private Eye despite its flaws), pro journalists writing on complex subjects are a bit like those know-it-all bores at parties who think they’re qualified to wax knowledgeable about any specialist subject but just end up talking too much.

Andrew.

Yes, the usual vox pop idiocies – all rather reminiscent of a Radio 5 phone-in.

Makes you grateful for the linear threads here, which (mostly) still work… barring major side-tracking or mad trolls.

Talking of which, I’m somewhat surprised that MMR AntiVax Uber-troll John Stone hasn’t shown up on Mike Fitzpatrick’s Times article comment thread.

I too vote for banning fancy-pants webstuffs. I have to use ie6 at work and it’s not that up to date on the Flash/Javascript front. I’m quite often buying stuff at lunch too so it means missing out on my purchasing largesse. Flash isn’t terribly useful for the ‘open in another window/tab’ style of browsing, either, in my experience.

As an addendum to this, others need to ensure that, as per the advice of Tim Berners-Lee and others, you use persistent URLs for content.

One of the problems I’ve come across in Comp Sci research, where quite a lot of useful material in my own area is web-based (either primarily or even exclusively in some cases) is an annoying tendency for links to be enormous, long-winded and temporally unstable things – transient in extremis. This usually results in a frustrating trawl through Google or somesuch to try and find the thing in question another way.

Of course, this requires a slight culture change across the board, though blogs do score highly in this regard.

[ “Adblock lets you screen out annoying adds on sites you use a lot (it’s not really worth using for one-off visits).”

If that’s because you’re having to block the ads manually, try the Adblock Filterset.G Updater, which does an excellent job of letting Adblock know what you don’t want to see. ]

Currently the website is actually recommending not installing this: http://adblockplus.org/en/faq_project#filterset.g

I believe subscriptions are useful, but I haven’t installed any myself as I don’t see that much point having filters installed for sites I’m not using. My comment above now looks a bit misleading. What I meant was, if you’re only visiting a page once (e.g. checking something you Googled), it’s not really worth the effort to click and block the ads on that page. However, for pages or sites that I use a lot, it’s well worth the trouble to be spared the adverts.

In reply to comment #15 – it’s not so much that individual writers ‘don’t bother’ to engage with readers… it’s just a huge grey area and more for the publishers to sort out what’s expected.

For instance, if you’re an impoverished freelancer you get paid for an article. You don’t get paid to engage in follow-up debate. Or a staff writer might have an article posted on there… but be out of the office when it appears.