Russ Gilbert

A fun mashup of two songs I honestly never thought would go together that well, let alone perfectly.

A note I was asked to write to a client that had so much sarcasm and snark that it became a blog post. Spiffy:

In 1998, splash screens were cool.

SEO wasn’t a factor. You could manipulate Alta Vista, the Google of the day, by messing with your meta tags. What was on the page didn’t matter in the slightest.

Web users weren’t jaded, and in fact the odds of someone viewing your splash screen actually being in the process of visiting a website for the very first time were actually pretty high.

The “oh cool” factor as your logo and content rendered not only existed but might even trigger user to call a friend over to see an effect that no one had ever seen before.

1998 was really quite some time ago. Things have changed.

Now a website is as much a utility as Microsoft Excel. The function is different, but the underlying idea is the same: Get the user to the thing they want as quickly as possible.

In addition, people’s attention spans are shorter. No one complains when syndicators (Hi Sean) cut the intro to Two and a Half Men (sorry for bringing that up) to just a few seconds to make room for more spots. It’s not why anyone was tuning in, and I suspect even in first run the intro falls victim to TiVo fast forward more often than not.

Imagine if every time you started your car, you had to sit through a 10 second “welcome” animation before you could do shift into drive. Some cars have this for their electronics packages and no one likes them. If they’re even aware of them, they don’t care. If they are aware, it probably bugs them. No one sits in awed anticipation for the lens flare on the Prius logo. (Citation needed, but I challenge anyone to find me a statistically relevant sample that disagrees).

And now, in addition to annoying if not driving away users, it annoys if not drives away the GoogleBot and negatively impacts the SEO.

Certainly there are things you can do to mitigate that.

Certainly you can key your site to set a cookie and only load the branding intro one time… but given how much time, effort and expense goes into creating an intro like that and mitigating the ill effects why do it at all if everyone’s only going to see it only once?

Flash is a great technology and can greatly enhance a website when used properly.

Video production is cool too, but you have to use it appropriately. What if every time you wanted to brush your teeth your bathroom mirror played a :15 for Colgate before the holder would release the toothbrush?

A website is there to draw users in. Some sites are there to engage users with their content. A splash screen puts a barrier between your users and your content or functionality, and I haven’t seen anything since circa 1998 to justify the cons.

My two cents, and I’d love to hear an opposite opinion. Like this email I received back in about 2000 from the true guru of web design: http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail51.html (won’t work on an iPad, sorry, blame Steve Jobs)

A couple of interesting articles today, seemingly unrelated but with a common thread.

The first is from the always thought-provoking Mark Ramsey about the dearth of content on radio station websites.

http://www.markramseymedia.com/2011/01/when-radio-has-no-idea-what-to-put-on-its-websites/

He’s spot-on with everything he says in this article, but the truth is that radio’s content problem runs deeper than the station website.  Hold that thought for a second.

Switching gears, we’ve got this article:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/06/fly-or-die-flipboard-tryx-windows-phone/

There are a few products reviewed, but the one I’m focusing on here is Flipboard – an iPad content app that allows the user to pull together content from all kinds of places (RSS feeds and social media both) and display them in a fairly elegant magazine-style layout.  It’s an aggregator, meaning that the “product” is really a combination of content from other sources presented in a seamless fashion.  The original source is less important to the user than the overall experience.

Aggregating content is exactly what radio used to do.  It still does with music, but most of the other elements have been removed.

A radio station in the 80′s and 90′s certainly played plenty of tunes, but people tuned in for more than that.  Dominant stations had a personality all their own, with the air talent, promotions, news, imaging and relevant info all forming an intricate patchwork right along with the songs.  Over the years, a lot of those other elements have been stripped away from far too many stations, leaving really just the music to carry everything, and it can’t.

It was possible to be successful as  a “more music” station before internet radio, satellite,  iPods,  etc., but in most cases even back then such stations played second fiddle to the personality driven powerhouses.

Nowadays, if you just want to hear music there are far better options than an FM radio station.  There are still stations and shows doing it right on the air, but I can only think of a few stations and shows that have successfully incorporated online into what they do, and most of those are syndicated and not about the stations they’re on at all.

I brought up Flipboard because of the irony that yet another “hot new thing” is actually something radio used to do well back in the day.  Sure Flipboard is visual and radio is aural, but the concepts behind them were once exactly the same, back before Radio got addicted to the heroin that is music.

Yes, I just compared music to heroin where radio is concerned.  Why?  It’s an easy thing to put on the air and helps get ratings that makes the execs feel good while their business goes down the toilet, and when things get worse the only solution most stations see is to do more of it.  I think the comparison is apt.

Sure, radio stations can hire bloggers… but to blog about what?  (Hint: NOT MUSIC.)  There’s got to be more happening on the air than does on most music stations now if bloggers are going to have anything interesting to write about.  If there’s nothing on which to build a community of listeners, why wouldn’t a blogger just go to Tumblr, or WordPress, or Blogger, or one of the other dozen or so blog platforms out there that let them do whatever they want?  It’s got to go beyond music, and right now most stations just don’t.

A great radio host builds a community of listeners who identify with the themes of the show.  Even outside of the traditional talk show format it’s possible to create a bond with the audience, but it’s happening less and less as radio companies tighten up playlists and push “formatics” designed to get ratings vs. connect with listeners.   (Don’t start me on Arbitron, this is supposed to be a short post and that one won’t be.)

If radio can get over its music habit and starts approaching product from the standpoint of providing something people in their market might want to listen to, the problems with web content will be gone before they know it.

An article on TechCrunch caught my eye during my flight back to LA.  http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/02/apple-google-newsstand/

After a quick point about old media’s shady marketing practices, the article makes a couple of interesting points about the need for “digital newsstands” but stops short of asking why such newsstands would need digital newspapers or magazines on them.

This begs an important question that I haven’t heard anyone ask yet:

Why not just get content directly from the authors and skip the unnecessary middlemen of the actual papers or magazines.

When I say “middlemen” I’m talking about those involved in the process whose job isn’t to actually create the content, but to print it on paper or mail it to your home.  You know, the job that no longer needs to be done in a digital world.

Think about it, If it’s all in one place, why would it need to be organized by the now-obsolete delivery mechanisms of the past vs. something useful in the present, like author and category?

People today don’t really care about the delivery mechanism that provides the content to them, and with just a few exceptions I’m not sure they ever did.

I’m not sure the publishers even realize this.  Most of the ones I’ve worked with personally don’t seem to.

Some perspective:

Consumers don’t seem to have a whole lot of respect for the great institution of the newspaper.  I’m not sure how it was before my time, but for as long as I remember it’s worked like this:

After being purchased for less than a dollar and usually only partially consumed maybe one time, most copies of the newspaper kept a standing appointment with the recycling bin, perhaps with a side trip lining the cage of Max, little Timmy’s new puppy in the process of being housebroken.

Newsprint (or a magazine) was simply the accepted method for distributing information to people on a regular basis.  Of course specific papers (employing specific writers and editors) achieved a certain reputation and respect among their readers, but never enough to stop this morning’s copy from a rather inglorious denouement at the hands (well, paws, with one held aloft) of man’s best friend.

What consumers do care about are actual people who create content, like for example Oprah, Jon Stewart, and Howard Stern.  They care far less about, if at all, the actual pipe the content comes in on, such as Comedy Central, Sirius/XM, or and virtually every single radio channel, TV channel, and newspaper in existence.

Don’t believe me?  Let’s take an example from recent history:

TV content has even more middlemen than the newspaper, who enjoy even less respect from the consumer.  Look no further than last year’s Conan/Leno debacle for proof.

Brands involved:  NBC, Your local NBC affiliate, and the 50 year old late night institution, “The Tonight Show.”

Humans involved:  Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien.

I don’t recall anyone coming up with catchy slogans like “I’m with Channel 5,”  ”I’m with NBC,” or even “I’m with The Tonight Show.”  The truth is, anyone who cared followed the host they were attached to.  The people who didn’t simply left the TV where it was while they fell asleep.

The lesson here is that in most cases consumers just do not care about the vast majority of the brands involved in delivering the content to them.  If they don’t care about those brands in print or on TV, why would they care about them on an iPad?

So with that I’ll make my first bold prediction of 2011, though there’s way too much momentum for the change to finish taking place this year.

The successful digital newsstand will not focus on newspapers or magazines.  It will focus on authors, topics and articles.  Do you think anyone cares if the “Los Angeles” category on such a newsstand is branded “LA Times” or just “LA News?”

Perhaps brands will rise around specific authors that organize by ideology or a credible source, but they probably won’t be the legacy players. They’re far more likely to be personality driven brands, like say, Michael Arrington on TechCrunch.

Why?  The publishers will be too busy trying to milk the last drops out of their dying business models and whining about how it’s not like the good old days to notice that the name at the top of the masthead isn’t the reason people used to subscribe.

When I set up this site I did so with high ambition and an intention to blog at least once a week.  Instead, I did it twice and then uh, got busy.

Don’t get me wrong, busy turned out to be a very good thing (mostly) but one of my resolutions for 2011 is to get a blog post out about something or other at least once a week.

Oh, and this one doesn’t count.