While the magazine is not something you can pick up in a store, Google is saying that it intends to publish all of the articles from the magazine on the Think Quarterly website and you can download PDF and EPUB copies of the first issue that you can then read on your iOS/Android tablets.

The thing that’s interesting about Think Quarterly to my mind is that, for a company that is roundly regarded as not having much taste when it comes to design, the magazine looks fantastic.¹ The layout is clean but with touches of visual flair here and there that encourage you to continue reading and, perhaps more importantly, assist in understanding the material.

All of which makes the website pretty disappointing. To be clear, the site is not ugly. And it’s not obviously a Google site. Definitely, it has style. No, the problem with the website is the way that the articles are displayed. Which is to say that you are able to read them and… that’s about it. Compare the lead story — an interview with Guy Laurence, the CEO of Vodafone UK — as it’s presented in the magazine with how it’s presented on the website.

Again, it’s not that the presentation is horrible. It’s just that it has no oomph. There is none of the flair that accompanies the article as it’s presented in the magazine. What’s more, while you might at first think that the layout really isn’t that bad, when it’s repeated for article after article after article, it begins to get a little stale. More to the point, it evidences a complete lack of imagination for the design of the site. Kudos to Google for putting well-written content up there to be sure, but it’s a sad reflection on where we are with web design that this would be considered a pretty good magazine website.

It’s tempting to say that one shouldn’t be surprised that Google has not put the same amount of attention to detail into the website as it has to the magazine (particularly when it has no financial incentive to do so). This is fine if Think Quarterly were the only publication afflicted with this problem. Unfortunately, it’s not. See here, here, here, here, here, here and here (and so it doesn’t look like I’m just picking on magazines: here, here, here, here and here). This isn’t a case of Think Quarterly’s designers lacking imagination. It’s a case of web designers in general lacking imagination. It’s a fundamental inability, more than 20 years after the web first started and over a decade since the Internet went mainstream, to create layouts and designs that match the quality of those in print.

I am not a hater. There is great work being done — some of it by Google, some of it by people who are not magazines and some of it by magazines that only exist on the web. It’s 2011. We can stop being the poor cousin. We just need to release our imaginations.²

The HuffPost wants you to write for free. The NYTimes wants you to pay up to $455/year to read online news. There’s got to be a better way.

I immediately tweeted back:

The NYT wants you pay (between $195 and) $455 to read the NYT. You’re welcome to read HuffPo for free as much as you want.

Gus Sentementes’ tweet was retweeted by my friend Michael Lee (@mukimu) and my response generated a back and forth between me and Michael (apologies to any of our mutual friends who, if they weren’t sick of me tweeting about what’s going on in Japan, are definitely sick of their twitterstream being flooded by me now). After about a dozen messages, I thought that it was time to ‘take this offline’¹.

The discussion between Michael and I went on for a while but essentially boiled down to the idea that people are not going to pay for NYT content when other content is available for free. I disagreed, primarily for two reasons.

First, not all content is created equal. Yes, there is free content but just because something is free doesn’t mean it’s the equivalent to something that you pay for. Television seems to be an excellent example of this. Free-to-air TV and pay TV continue to coexist because there is content on pay TV that isn’t available on free-to-air TV (or isn’t available for a period of time) and people want to watch it enough to pay for it.²

Second, it’s not that expensive. US$455 might sound like a lot (it’s US$1.20 a day) but NYT is saying you’re going to have access to their website for US$195 a year. That’s less than 50 cents a day. I believe there are people out there that don’t think the New York Times is worth 50 cents a day. Fine. But what kind of reader is that type of person? Probably not the type of person who is interested in paying to see a movie, upgrading their entertainment device, going on an exotic holiday or buying a fancy car. That is, not the type of reader that advertisers in the New York Times want to reach.

I’m not 100% sure this is going to work but I disagree with Gus’ original argument. There isn’t a better way. The way that things work in the market is that, if people want something, they pay for it. I love newspapers but there is no law that states newspapers must exist for all time. If it turns out that the business models of the 20th century are ill-suited to the 21st, such is life.

After the discussion in a previous blog post, I tried to create an alternative to the current New York Times Opinion page that dealt with the issues I had. (The image was mocked up very quickly and I didn’t bother properly lining things up, so apologies there.)

Linklines

I’ve dispensed with the headlines as I think they’re part of the issue for me and have replaced them with what I’m calling ‘linklines’.

In a print newspaper, headlines serve no purpose other than to draw attention to the article. For opinion pieces, they are not intended to summarise the article but rather to give a flavour for the article. In print, this is fine because if I want to scan the article to see if I want to read it, I can: the article is right there.

On the web, though, I think headlines need to be replaced with something else when they’re functioning as links. Enter the linkline. The headlines have been replaced with these linklines and I find the result much more helpful in determining whether I want to continue reading.

Snippets

A good linkline makes a snippet irrelevant and they’ve been omitted completely.

Site Maps

Site maps are typically ignored by web designers when designing a page. If they are included, they’re put in a ghetto of their own — away from everything else useful. I believe site maps are incredibly important for assisting a reader in understanding context. In the comments, this came up as one of the problems I might be having.

To again compare with print, a ‘site map’ is typically unnecessary on each page for a few reasons:

1. If the work is long enough to require a site map (read: table of contents), it is easily accessible with one or two jumps from any position in the work. These jumps can be conducted almost instantly. This is not the case when a website where a user must search for the page where the site map has been dumped.
2. It is always clear from the physical object where you are in the work. The physical properties provide ‘context’ for the reader. These properties are completely absent from websites and contribute to the disorientation that a reader may experience.

Accordingly, a site map has been inserted into the footer of the page.

So, what do you think? Does it make a difference for you?

I’m typing this while writing in a room that looks like a bomb hit it so allow me to be more specific.

I hate information clutter. Really hate isn’t the right word because it’s not like I get worked up about it.¹ I mean hate in the sense of can’t stand it and can’t stand it in the sense of I don’t want to be around this so I’m going to leave. The way that you might not be able to stand the smell of something.

But I’m starting to think that I must be crazy because it doesn’t seem to matter how much more advanced websites get, they don’t change in this respect. HTML5 replaces Flash but it doesn’t stop pages that are three or four scrolls deep. CSS3 allows us to throw around rounded boxes with gay abandon but it doesn’t result in fewer rounded boxes.

I tend to believe in the idea that if you’re the only person that has a problem, maybe you’re the problem. So I’m thinking this must mean that I’m a crazy person. I’m writing this partly as an admission of defeat and partly as a cry into the wilderness. Are there any other crazy people out there?

For those of you for whom what I’m saying isn’t immediately making sense, allow me to illustrate with an example. I love the New York Times; it’s a great newspaper and I feel privileged that I can read it each day for nothing on its website. Yesterday, the Times launched a new look to the Opinion section of its website. (You can see it here.) John Gruber praised it as being a ‘nice layout’ and from what I’ve seen most people think it’s pretty spiffy.

I hate it.²

And I hate it because of information clutter. I hate it because I can hit the Page Down key four times before I get to the bottom of the page.

To be clear, I love long form writing and long form journalism in particular. I have created a website whose entire purpose is to allow me to read long form journalism more enjoyably. Let no man read this and think that I wish the columnists would simply use fewer words. No, what I’m getting at are long front or splash pages. Pages that welcome you upon arrival to a website or section. And which just go on forever. Like turtles, it’s content all the way down.

We’re not talking about four pages of endless scrolling that is filled with a site map or something. This is four pages of content. At the time of writing, if you hit the Page Down key four times you will make it to the bottom of the front page and you will be presented with a teaser to an article by Jeff McMahan about carnivores. This is a real article. If you click on it, you are taken to an article that is 2,789 words long.

But this is my question: who is clicking on this? Who is hitting Page Down four times, getting to the bottom and then clicking on this link?³ I can’t believe anyone is. And yet these endless front pages are pervasive. And on really, really popular websites. See Yahoo!, Amazon, MSN, YouTube, AOL.

When I go to a site like this, even when it’s a site filled with content that I like, I invariably find myself shutting it. I can’t deal with the information overload and I’d rather not look at it. This cannot be the case for most people, though. If it were, these websites would change. They’re big and successful and popular because people visit them (not because people close them).

But it just doesn’t make any sense. Gahhhh!

Take the Amazon page. I’m looking at it now and if I hit the Page Down key three times, I am presented with ‘Bounce’ fabric softener. Who the fuck clicks on this? Who looks at the first row of products, the second row, the third row — indeed six rows — and then thinks to themselves, Ah ha! Fabric softener! At last!⁴

According to Wikipedia, Amazon made $24.5 billion. In 2009. Last year, I did not make even one billion dollars. Clearly what they are doing is working. Which is why I’m thinking I must be crazy. I must have the problem. I must be the odd one out.

Excuse me while I sit in a corner muttering to myself.

All of this got me thinking about the intersection of advertising and online content. I’ve been meaning to write something about this for some time now and Brown’s final question seemed like the perfect point to jump off from:

Wasn’t the web supposed to be better than this? Wasn’t there a promise that we could generate money and meaning, not merely the former? I’m still looking; but when I find it I will part with every penny I have.

I do believe that for some sites the answer has been found. It’s called the Deck. The Deck is an excellent example of an advertising platform that makes sense on the web. It succeeds in spite of (or perhaps because of?) its unobtrusiveness. I’ve found over a repeated period of time that I click on more ads it runs than on any other competing advertising platform, including Google’s.

For those not familiar with the Deck, a quick introduction. The Deck is an advertising network run by the design firm Coudal Partners. At the time of writing, it consists of a network of 33 selected web sites and services whose audience is primarily creative, web and design professionals (or those with pretensions to be so). Every one of those 33 sites and services shows only one advertisement per page and each advertisement consists of a 120 px x 90 px image with 180 characters of accompanying text. That’s it. The sites that are part of the Deck agree not to run any other advertisements so that Deck ad is the only ad on their page. At the time of writing, a month of advertising across the Deck will set you back a cool US$6900.

There are two reasons I believe the Deck works. The first is that they’ve found the balance between advertising and content. As Brown notes in her piece, as advertising becomes more disruptive we become better at tuning it out (either by avoiding the content that the ads are attached to or by selectively blocking out the ads using technological tools). But the Deck showcases an alternative way to get our attention: don’t be noisy, be exclusive.

The second reason the Deck works is that it’s targeted. Now when people think about targeted advertising they usually think about the kind of algorithmic targeting that has made Google a squillion dollars. But there is a different kind of targeting that for want of a better term I’ll call targeting by intelligent design. Targeting by intelligent design may be even more successful than algorithmic targeting.

Targeting by intelligent design has two aspects. The first is to have a sufficiently narrow audience. The audience of people that view the ads on the Deck are likely to be creative, web or design professionals because the sites that form the Deck are aimed specifically at that small segment. They’re almost all blogs run by a single blogger and almost all have a small range of stories they’ll cover³.

The second element of targeting by intelligent design has to do with the advertisers themselves. Advertisements on the Deck are only accepted if the Deck’s owners have either used or paid for that service or product. While at first glance this might seem counterproductive I would contend (and my experience demonstrates) it produces better, more relevant ads that are more likely to appeal to the target audience. Moreover, it elevates the ads from shill to endorsement since there is implicit in their placement the knowledge that these ads, and these ads alone, have met the standard necessary to be displayed.

Targeting by intelligent design is by no means an idea exclusive to the Deck. The web comic Penny Arcade successfuly employs a variation of the same strategy. The Penny Arcade web site features only two advertisements on their news pages and one ad on their comic pages. Although the ads typically feature animation and video they are tastefully located and tightly integrated into the overall design of the page. Penny Arcade has similar rules to the Deck and only carries advertisements for products or services they’ve used or paid for.

Intelligent design won’t work for everyone of course. The New York Times is read by too many different people to be able to employ exactly the same tactics as the Deck or Penny Arcade but perhaps a combination of the two is possible.

Consider the case of the news magazine Slate. Slate is an online-only magazine very much in the mould (when it comes to the range of content) of news magazines like Time and Newsweek. Its main focus is on US politics but it runs feature stories on science, health, economics and the environment as well as lighter fare on topics ranging from the latest movies to what to do in the event that you’ve slept with your wife’s sister.

Unfortunately for Slate, it employs the worst examples of algorithmic and intelligent design targeting. The main banner ads are certainly selected based on a rough idea of the type of people that constitute the audience but it is a very rough idea. While the target audience for Slate is no doubt narrowish it’s still a fair bit wider than that of Penny Arcade. Two ads that I’ve seen feature prominently in recent months have been for Hyundai cars and for a National Geographic special. Now I have no interest in Hyundai cars. I am neither in the market for a car nor am I sure I could even buy a Hyundai in Japan if I even wanted to. I’m also not particularly interested in National Geographic specials. Both these ad campaigns were completely wasted on me. They’re classy ads, to be sure, and they most assuredly cost a lot of money to make. The problem is I’m never going to click on them.

The algorithmic advertising is even worse. When I visit at the moment I’m bombared with offers to murder my wrinkles, whiten my teeth and gain certification in Six Sigma. I have no interest in clicking on any of these⁴. They distract from the intelligent design advertisements, make the site look cheap and, from a reading point of view, add a degree of clutter that makes it annoying to read the content I actually came to the site to view.

Now why can’t Slate combine the two and feature fewer ads but make them better targeted? The fact of the matter is no matter how wonderful an ad, I’m likely to only click on one advertisement per page (if only because once I’ve clicked on it I’m going to be taken away from the page). Before we had the sophisticated kind of algorithms we now do this might have justified showing a bunch of ads and hoping the law of averages meant I’d click on one of them. But we’re in 2009 now. Surely we can do better and select only one ad, but make it be one I’m almost certain to want to click.

Maybe it’s all too complicated once you get past a certain size. Perhaps large content-producing monoliths like newspapers and magazines are doomed to go the way of the Dodo and this is what Brown was getting at when she lamented the web’s seeming inability to combine making money with making meaning. That may be the case and if it comes to pass I’ll be disappointed for sure. But hey, you big guys had a good run for a while. Maybe it’s the turn of the small fry now.

The thing, though, is that when I blow off steam about something (like, say, a certain fast food restaurant in a certain country missing a certain crucial condiment) I’m not used to someone employed at the target of my ire responding to me directly. I’m not sure I even want them to. It’d be weird if while I was out with friends I suddenly got a call from Colonel Sanders telling me it was all to do with licensing.

But that’s exactly what happened. (Well, not exactly. Still no word, Colonel Sanders!) On Wednesday night I complained about the new site GamerDNA on Twitter. On Thursday I got a message from the community manager of the site saying they were always eager for comments and asking if I had any constructive feedback. After they did that I felt a little guilty. Which is why I wrote the following.

In case you were wondering.

Dear GamerDNA people,

My name is Michael Camilleri and I use your web site. I also really dislike your web site. As you are aware I made these feelings known on Twitter and received a very kind response from Sam Houston. Feeling like I owed you something slightly more constructive in return I wrote the following. Please forgive the tone. I’ve tried my best to be constructive but I am at times really frustrated by some of your design decisions and my tone probably reflects that.

If I could only fix one thing about the site it would be its consistency. Consistency is usually viewed through the prism of reactions. Is the reaction to something the same every time? If not, then it’s not consistent. But sometimes consistency is about actions. Is the action to do something the same every time? If not, that’s not consistent either. It takes us a while to learn how to use something and we learn by doing. If we’re doing it a different way each time that’s going to slow down the learning process and potentially frustrate the user when they don’t seem to understand how a site works.

Adding games, arguably the primary purpose of the site, provides an illustration of what I’m talking about. There are at least four different ways to add games. Each is reached by a different path described below.

Method 1

1. Go to any page.
2. Click on ‘Home’.
3. Click on ‘Add a game’.

Method 2

1. Go to any page.
2. Mouseover the ‘Home’ menu.
3. Click on ‘Games’.
4. Click on ‘Add a game’.

Method 3

1. Go to any page.
2. Click the drop-down arrow next to your username.
3. Click on ‘Add a game’.

Method 4

1. Go to any page.
2. Click the drop-down arrow next to your username.
3. Click on ‘Edit my GamerDNA’.
4. Click on ‘Games’.
5. Click on ‘Add a game’.

This all borders on ridiculous when you realise that if you click on the top-level menu item entitled ‘Games’ you can’t actually add a game from this page! Not to mention that it’s just plain confusing that there is a top-level ‘Games’ menu item and a ‘Games’ menu item within the ‘Home’ drop-down menu. Labelling like this confuses the user and makes it difficult to create a mental map of how the site is laid out.

But perhaps you think having multiple paths to achieve an outcome is a good idea. Cutting down on paths isn’t consistency but minimalism, you might respond. For the sake of argument, I’ll grant you you’re right. Let’s see what happens if we judge consistency purely in terms of reaction to user input.

Look at the menu bar at the top of the screen. The top-level menu bar features five links: Home, Games, Players, Groups, Quizzes, News, Tools and Forums. Some of the items on this are drop-down menus in addition to being links. (Why this is the case isn’t clear. Aren’t there subsections to Games? Or at least shouldn’t there be on a site called GamerDNA?) Drop-down menus are identified by a little down arrow. Links that don’t have an arrow aren’t drop-down menus. And drop-down menus require a mouseover to activate… except when they don’t. In the case of the username drop-down menu at the top of the screen you have to click to make this menu appear. Why? As the user I don’t know and it makes me unsure what else might be a drop-down menu. So now I have to click things to find out. Except now I’ve clicked something and it’s taken me to a new page and now I’m frustrated and angry and am going off to Twitter to complain to all my friends.

Or consider the inconsistency of the site’s design. Clearly, there are (at least) two sites here. One is a Rails app that looks typically Railsy (or it might be Cake or one of the alternatives but I’m guessing Rails). It’s what you see when you go to www.gamerdna.com and what you see when you edit your GamerDNA or add a game.

The other site is a forum. This looks typically forumy, circa 2001. Which is to say crap. It’s most visible in the forum (surprise, surprise) but you can see it when you edit your profile and do a few other things on the site. While clearly some effort has been made to glue the two together the result is far from seamless and I find this sort of inconsistency interrupts my enjoyment of an otherwise pretty site and makes the whole thing feel unfriendly.

Well, maybe you did all of the above on purpose or at least have very good reasons^TM for why things are the way that they are. Fine. I don’t think you do but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. We’ll put consistency to one side and look at a couple of the other problems on the site.

Let’s take the the act of logging in to the site. Many sites these days accept either a username or email address to log in but the GamerDNA site accepts only a username. This is not in and of itself a problem but because of the way the login box works it becomes one. GamerDNA uses a trick to place the phrase ‘member name’ inside the username field. This word disappears when the field is selected. You can see a similar trick employed at Tumblr. The problem is that when you click ‘Log In’ from the top menu the field is automatically selected and the user never sees the phrase ‘member name’ but instead an empty field. They assume, since this looks like a social networking site, that they’ll be able to type in their email address. When that fails they don’t know why and they’re confused. They’re frustrated and angry and now they’re going off to Twitter to complain to all their friends.

And while we’re on the topic of social networks, how about trying to find your friends list? Our prototypical user–let’s call him ‘Mike’–is on his home page and wants to view his friends list. Mike looks on the page for a link to something titled friends list but can’t find it. Not being able to find a direct link he looks to the top menu and see the menu option ‘Players’. It seems reasonable a friends list might be located within such a top-level menu option so he clicks ‘Players’. But this doesn’t take him to a friends list. Instead, he’s taken to a page that allows him to find people based on their avatar (why?).

Well, there must be some way to look at his friends list. Maybe it’s in the ‘Home’ drop-down menu. Nope. Maybe it’s in the username drop-down menu somewhere. He clicks on that but nothing promising there. Maybe there isn’t a friends list. But wait, he added a friend at one point. Now just guessing, Mike figures he’ll try look at his public profile page. He open the username drop-down menu and clicks ‘Public Profile’. He quickly looks over the page; doesn’t see it. (It is actually there, it’s just hidden halfway down the page in the right-hand side column.) Becoming increasingly frustrated at this point (urge to twitter rising) he gives it one last chance. He’ll view his GamerDNA. The only way to do this seems to be to edit it so he goes back to the username drop-down menu and clicks on ‘Edit my GamerDNA’. Ah, there’s a section called ‘Friends’. This might be it! Mike clicks on it and there it is. Finally!

That took 5 minutes. To find my friends list. On a social networking site.

And that’s why I twittered.

Your friend,

Mike.

PS. I really would like to help the site. If further critique is useful let me know. I can go on for a bit about the process of deleting a game after it’s accidentally been added.

As is so often the case with these things when I went searching for the site myself I’d forgotten the name. I knew of WriteRoom (an OS X application that popularised the distraction-free concept and on which DarkCopy is based) so I went looking for web-based alternatives to it.

While I didn’t type the right things into Google to get DarkCopy to come up I did discover another alternative in my search, Writer. Writer styles itself as the ‘internet typewriter’ and does pretty much the same thing DarkCopy does while adding a teeny weeny bit more functionality. It’s still mostly text on a black background but in addition there’s a word count, the ability to print, email, convert to PDF and, for me the most important difference, save your work. Writer autosaves your work to its servers so you don’t need to worry about accidentally closing the window or having to leave your work half-written (it uses cookies to remember you so it’s not even necessary to create an account, it starts saving stuff right away).

This extra functionality sits relatively unobtrusively at the bottom of the page. True aficionados will point out this still provides a distraction but as someone that rarely finishes a piece of writing in one sitting it’s crucial for me to be easily able to save and recover documents I’ve written previously.

The only thing I dislike about Writer is it doesn’t appear possible to resize the input window. If you have a large viewing window this isn’t too much of a problem but as someone who uses it on my wife’s 12″ iBook it’s a little frustrating to be able to only see two paragraphs of text. Particularly when the layout leaves a good deal of space empty at the very bottom of the page. I tried a few Firefox extensions that claim to resize text input fields but they didn’t help either. I’ve sent off an email to the site’s creator, John Watson, suggesting it as a feature he might like to implement but considering how many people there are using the site on their wife’s 12″ iBook (a rough estimate puts it at one) I don’t really expect anything to materialise any time soon.

So, in conclusion, Writer comes recommended as an excellent (and did I mention free?) alternative to Word, Notepad, Windows Live Writer or whatever it is you’re currently typing your stuff into.

The logic behind the success of advertising to people using a search engine is relatively straightforward. You go to Google for one reason: you’re looking for something. If it’s something someone else can provide to you then they’re interested in getting your attention and (and really this is the crucial part) you’re interested in clicking their link. But if you go to Facebook or MySpace how interested are you in what someone is pushing on you? Regardless of how-well-targeted it is?

Advertising in social networks reminds me of when a friend recommends you go and see a movie. How successful is that ever? I can count the number of times on one hand I think someone’s said I ‘must see’ a film and I’ve actually done it. Certainly, I can think of plenty of times I’ve all but begged my friends to see a film and found that seemingly the more I’m interested in the movie the less they are. This goes for TV shows, music, podcasts and just about any other content you can think of. So difficult is it, in fact, that I’ve developed a tactic for suggesting things without suggesting thing; having them ‘come up’ in conversation and gently steering the person into thinking that they’re coming up with the idea of going.

Because isn’t that what it’s really about? We want to believe we made the choice. We don’t want to think that we do whatever someone else tells us to. And as soon as we start feeling they are our resistance levels increase dramatically.

I want to be clear to contrast this from asking for help from our friends. Here the recommendations are almost always acted upon but that’s because we’re choosing to elicit them them. Recommendations aren’t being pushed in this instance, they’re being pulled. When people talk about the huge influence our friends have on us, I tend to think they’re talking about their influence when we’ve decided it’s time to make a decision and we start looking for advice. Not when we’re trying to watch something on TV.

Which brings us back to the success of social networking advertising. Because how do you monetise pulled recommendations? If we jump onto the Flixster Facebook application, for instance, to see what our friends think we’re interested in what our friends think, not on ads being served up to us because of what our friends think. I guess if someone serves us up some cinema locations it’d be relevant, but that seems a much, much, much smaller potential pool of advertisers. And a correspondingly much, much, much smaller pool of money.

Yes, that’s right. Worst. Web. Service. Ever.

I’m having to resort to hyperbole because it’s all I have left. It appears as if rational argument can’t convince those crazy Swiss guys to go back to their original design. Even floods of users departing their site doesn’t do any good. No, as far as I can tell the only thing that might possibly get through to them is for someone to call them out as the most terrible web 2.0 experience out there.

This is, of course, not true. There are plenty of truly horrible services in existence and coComment isn’t quite challenging them (yet). But what breaks the heat of anyone who really enjoyed using their product (read: me) was that they have, with a single redesign to their site, completely ruined it. And for seemingly no reason. The old site worked! Sure, I had problems with the Firefox extension but the site itself worked. No longer! It’s now awfully slow, completely unreliable, terrible to use and boasts a colour scheme that only a mother could love. A colour-blind, epileptic monkey. On acid.

The brilliance of coComment before was that it made following comments easy. You could see all the threads you were subscribed to and quickly view new comments to see if anyone had left anything interesting to say (read: related to what you’d said). To do the same thing now is incredibly tedious (and blinding). Now you’re presented with a list of threads you’re subscribed to. They ones that have been updated are bolded (you might think the green dot next to them indicates their status but you’d be wrong). To view them you have to click on each one and then wait. Probably go do some other stuff while you wait because it could be a while. Eventually the page will load and then you can see the new comments. Want to view the next thread? Click back. Wait. Wait. Wait some more. Keep waiting. OK, here you are. Click on the next thread. Guess what? Time to wait again!

See a pattern here? They made what was once a tedious experience (visiting every page you’d commented on) and made it more tedious! I cannot emphasise enough just how bad it now is compared to what it was. I can’t think of anything like it. I’m sure there must be examples in the tech world where a great service was run completely into the ground. If you can think of any suggest them in the comments. What did you do? Were you able to turn it around? How?

I really just wanted to write this as a public service announcement more than anything else. Lest anyone think I was recommending the service I am not. Please do not use coComment. I don’t like most of their competitors much either so I don’t know what to suggest in the alternative. Go outside and hug a tree, I guess. They’re still working great.

The immediate answer would be none. Once I’ve sent those track listings off to Last.fm that’s it. If CBS chooses to keep that information until the end of eternity there’s not much I can do about it. To some that’s probably the way it ought to be. Nobody’s forcing me to use Last.fm. Just as no one’s forcing me to use Remember the Milk or Flickr or del.icio.us. And fair enough, they’re not. If control is such a big deal to me don’t use those services. But what about Gmail? How realistic is it to say that’s a choice? Sure, if you’re hard-core enough you can run your own mail server and handle all that stuff yourself but is this what we really expect Joe Average to do in the event he ‘chooses’ not to use someone else to be his mail provider? Hardly. If it’s not Gmail it’s going to be Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL or failing a free provider – his ISP. In short, someone else is going to be managing that data for him.

And the move of applications online is only set to get worse in which case this issue becomes all the more pertinent. Because while I would argue we currently have little to no data rights the more I think about it the more I think we should. Firstly, though, what do I mean by data rights? Allow me to elaborate on what I think this means and how I think it can be used to improve this situation.

Now keep in mind that what I’m sketching out is just that, a sketch. This is a rough draft of the what I think data rights should be and I reserve the right to change it should more insightful people than me make suggestions on how it could be improved. In other words, bear with me. This is as much an unknown journey for me as it is for you.

Data Rights in a Nutshell

As I see it there are four basic rights (although there’s a complication I’ll get to later on that muddies this neat distinction). I’ll deal with each in turn but first let’s introduce them. The fab four are: the right to access, the right to view, the right to export and the right to delete.

The right to access is the one that most crops up in the public imagination so I’ll deal with that first. Almost any site you go to that requires you to submit information will assure you that that information will not be shared with third parties. This makes the right to access probably the only data right that is already generally recognised. But there are issues that I see rarely dealt with in quite as an up-front manner as the general no-third-party disclaimer. What happens if the company is sold? What happens if data is accessed without your permission? What if data is given to a third party? What then? What recourse do you have? A right to access would, in theory, provide answers to all of those questions. It would give you certainty in how your data can be used and what parties it can be given to. It would also make it clear what would happen in the event that the right was infringed. And it would do all of this in a way that’s easy for the average person to understand as opposed to buried in an avalanche of legalese. 

The next right is the right to view. This is relatively straightforward and is provided for (at least in part) by most web sites. Generally speaking, if you create data using a web service you can view it. Otherwise what would be the point? Easy enough. Or at least easy enough for data that you directly created. By ‘directly create’ I mean data that you create by directly providing something to the service: a blog post, for example, or a photo. But what about data that you create indirectly It’s this data that you very rarely see but which web services increasingly value. Google tracks almost everything I do on Google. Some of that data it provides access to, some of it it doesn’t. The broadest understanding of the right to view would mean they had to.

Moving along we come to the right to export. This was in fact what originally prompted this entire inquiry. What if I decide I no longer want to use Google to manage my email? I thought one day. Sure, things are working out well at the moment but maybe one day we’ll get sick of each other. Maybe I’ll long for the push functionality Yahoo mail provides with the iPhone. So I decide to move but how can I export the mails I’ve received or indeed any that I’ve created? I suppose I could go through and forward every single email I’ve ever received or written but how realistic is that going to be as the years go by? What if this is 10 years from now and I decide I want to change? What if I decide I don’t want to use Last.fm any more, I want to start using MOG? The right to export would mean that web services need to provide a way to not only view the data, but to extract it. Now again, there’s the question of directly and indirectly created data and whether both types of data should be covered by the right. In most cases I can think of indirect data would not be of that much use to a third party service but maybe I’m wrong. It’d be nice to have the option.

The final right is the right to delete and its as simple as it sounds. It’s the common-sense interpretation of delete, though, not the one some web services have chosen to adopt. Which is to say that if I click delete my data really is deleted. It’s not just no longer visible to me. It’s completely gone. This issue in particular is going to become more contentious as time goes by regardless of whether people call it a data right or something else. The average person is not comfortable with the idea sensitive emails may be retained long after they’ve been deleted by the user. They’re going to think that if they pressed delete it’s really gone.

What are the Problems?

Now there are some obvious problems that arise whenever rights are formalised. How widely should those rights be applied? To whom should they apply? How are they enforced? More specifically for our concerns, do they cover data that has been made public? What about data that is visible to a group outside of the user but not necessarily to every Tom, Dick and Harry? Are rights even enforceable on the Internet? If they’re not enforceable, are they really rights anyway? I don’t propose to completely answer every question generated by the concept of data rights but instead will attempt to sketch out a response to some of these questions and what I think is the most useful application of the data rights concept.

The first issue raised by data rights is one of scope. I run this blog and it collects personal data. Do I need to provide people with the ability to control the access to all that data or view it or export it or delete it? I run a discussion board as well for some friends from university. Again, one wonders if this would fall inside the scope of these rights. Indeed, given the ever-increasing nature of collaboration on the web – whether it’s YouTube or Wikipedia – if these data rights apply to any information created by the user this means most web sites out there. Would data rights instead of giving power to the use simply envelop web site owners in mountains of red tape?

In attempting to answer this question perhaps the public/private divide can be of assistance. When we stop and think about the types of data this could apply to it strikes me that it’s mostly private data with which we’re concerned. The blog pages as opposed to the Wikipedia pages. Of course the issue of public and private it itself fraught with danger. Is a blog private? Or at least ought it to be considered private for the purposes of data rights? If it is to to be considered private by what criteria do we make that decision? Have I just made things more complicated with this distinction rather than solving anything?

I think there’s still something public/private has to offer us as a criterion. My suggestion would be that data rights should apply to all data that can be made private. So if you have a LiveJournal and choose to make it public your data rights would be preserved since the option to make entries private is always yours. In contrast, since you can’t choose whether to make your comments private or not these would not be protected by data rights. Or as another example, the fact that you made your Facebook profile public wouldn’t mean you had forgone data rights that the use who had kept it private had retained.

But even if we grant that the public/private divide provides us with a way to determine the scope of data rights what of their enforceability? For even if we agree what data rights there should be and even if we agree how these rights are to be applied, how on Earth do we propose on the Internet of all places to enforce them? Would we legislate them? Or try to get nations to agree to it as some sort of accord?

It seems to me that neither of these options is very practical. So what instead? Well even though I’ve called them data rights (in part because maybe someday they will be recognised as legally binding rights but mostly because I’m a law graduate) it seems to me the most useful application of them would be as principles.

Data Rights as Principles

One of the big problems at the moment with personal data is that it’s not clear what’s being done with it. There are privacy policies or terms of use the more legally-minded among us might enjoy wading through but I don’t believe the average person has any idea what Google, Yahoo or Microsoft is allowed to do with their email.

I see data rights being use in a way that primarily provides users with information about what will happen with their data. In the same way that Creative Commons has utilised plain language and easy to understand graphics I think data rights could do the same. Imagine if when you joined up for an email address there was a little graphic that quickly told you what rights you had. It would be easy then for people to compare services and see which best catered to their needs. Data rights could be backed up by the same sort of real world legally-valid licences that Creative Commons provides so if one did need to seek legal recourse it was there but that wouldn’t be the point of them. The point would be to help you understand what level of control you wielded.

That’s enough from me, I think. What do you think?