Posts Tagged ‘News sites’
YouTube is number 5 in Denmark
The Danish Union of Internet Media (FDIM) has recently conducted a quite thorough survey on the Danes online behaviour in January 2008.
Number 1 is Google (surprise surprise!) with 15 millions visits(!) in January. But what's interesting, for me anyway, is that YouTube is at number 5! YouTube had b little over 1.1 million Danish visits in January, which is more that any of the online newspapers here in Denmark.
The only ones to beat YouTube (apart from Google, of course) are:
- Krak (a service which lets you look up addresses and phone numbers and view the results on a map (think white and yellow pages))
- DR.dk (the Danish Broadcoast Association, which gets a lot of visits, apart from the news service, from people viewing the online TV-guides, listening to internet radio, downloading podcasts and reading more about the various shows)
- TV2 (the largest private television channel in Denmark, which (just like DR) gets a lot of visits from people viewing other things than news and watching online television (their main product) - TV2 also offers online games)
So considering all of this, I think it's a fairly good result for YouTube. I for one use YouTube all of the time, sometimes just for listening to music. I had no idea that the service is that popular in this country, though.
My good friend Kim has the entire list [in Danish] (taken from Danish media news site MediaWatch) [also in Danish]. You can download the entire report from FDIM [it's a PDF file and yes, it's also in Danish].
Related postsTags: Danish media, Denmark, Google, Internet newspapers, News sites, Video, YouTube
NBC deletes a post - and the blogosphere knows it
Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has a post on the fact that a guy at NBC published a post about NBC's social networking policy on his blog, and then removed it.
As Arrington points out »it’s always the deleted blog posts that get the most attention« — so there's no point in deleting the policy for NBC, it only creates suspicion on why it was done.
I once interviewed Robert Scoble on this exact issue (deleting blog posts), where he said that he would advise the blogger to just leave the post online.
Hear my interview with Robert Scoble,
128 kbps MP3, 33:06 min, 30.3 megabytes | right click and choose "save as"
Arrington says:
Perhaps they just made a decision that having their go forward social networking strategy out there for the world to see wasn’t good for competitive reasons. Or perhaps they finally acquired another social network, something Kanaujia discusses in the last paragraph of the post. Either way, he just guaranteed that far more people will now read the post than if he just left it up on his blog
And he's right.
Related postsTags: Blogging, Media, News sites
Danish news site blocking search bots
Why is Danish newspaper Politiken keeping all search bots from indexing its site?
I've done a post in Danish on this on my ByteMe-blog, but figured I might as well just post one here.
The thing is, I've discovered that Politiken has a robots.txt file, that makes sure, that no search engine bots index anything.
This is strange, considering that 32 hits for a search for 'Libanon' (Danish for Lebanon) get through the "filter", but on MSN Search, there are only 6 hits. Strange.
Is it about the deep links?
Well, the big question here is, obviosly, why the people at Politiken are so eager to keep the bots out. Politiken has earlier been against deep linking. Read this article about it (in Danish).
Now, the way I see it, the reason for being against deep links must be because Politiken wants their users to find the articles by going to the Politiken.dk front page and find them from there, my guess is that this has something to do with ads.
And the fact that the bots are being completely blocked out now could be another step in Politiken's policies towards deep linking. Now users HAVE to go to the front page to search for articles.
But is that clever? Shouldn't people have the right to search for as innocent data as journalistic articles via the internet's search engines, instead of using the various search engines on the various site? I think so.
Related postsTags: Advertising, Google, News sites, Search engines
This world's leading blog?
According to Danish it newspaper ComON, Washington Post has launched, was is, apparently, going to be the leading blog in the world.
According to the article in ComON, the subjects include what influences everything from politics and economy to culture has on the world we're living in.
The new blog is called PostGlobal, check it out before your mum.
Related postsTags: Blogs, News sites, Web 2.0
Using URLs the right way
As the various search engines get used more and more, it becomes more and more important to adopt a logic link structure. Both so the user can get a fairly good taste of what the side has to offer, and to make it easier to use.
The ideal way, in my opinion, to use URLs are in this form:
www.yourdomain.com/year/month/day/title-of-post-or-article
Note, that this is how it is with this blog :-)
The English IT news service, The Register are also using this.
Example:
Besides the fact, that the link looks way better that
www.yourdomain.com/?p=319
…it's also the searcher's dream. And this is the nice part!
For example, if you want to use Google to search through The Register's archive from november 2004 for the word "Longhorn" you simply type this:
Using this the user can either search the archives for a given year, month (as shown above) or even a specific day.
The site-search in Google, and MSN Search isn't used/known by a lot of people - at least not that I know of. But this shows it from its most powerful side.
The next thing that could be added to the link structure could be a category. But in my opinion, it should be the USER'S choice whether or not to include the category in the site-search. This means that a Google search for
longhorn site:theregister.co.uk/2004/11
COULD be narrowed in by seaching for
longhorn site:theregister.co.uk/software/2004/11
Note that this is just a suggestion, another category than "software" would probably be preferable. But it shows my point.
What I'm trying to say is that searching for both URLs should be possible.
All of this shows how the URLs, which I suspect is one of the things, that the editors on the web don't pay too much attention to, can be improved - especially when it comes to searching from "outside" search engines like Google and MSN Search.
Let us hope that more will follow in the The Register's footsteps - dammit Alexis, I want those URLs!! ;-)
Related postsTags: CMS, News sites, Search engines, Web-usability
Advertising: A step too far
The Danish IT newspaper, ComON learned a lesson in online advertising; In deed, there is a limit on how much, the users will put up with.
ComON had a blue Dell banner, that rolled horizontal across the screen like a marquee, and if the user scrolled the page vertically, the banner followed them, covering both text and images.
This resulted in several request from the users to remove the banner.
And so, yesterday (Tuesday) they removed the banner.
I'm not sure, if the banner was visible in Firefox, but I didn't see it on my Firefox.. perhaps because I use AdBlock at work, and AdMuncher at home :-)
Related postsTags: Advertising, News sites
Danish online news sites and web standards
Behind this long title is a test I've done on, how well the Danish online news sites are in compliance with the W3C standards.
I entitled the short study "Danish online news sites and (non-)compliance with the W3C standards", since long titles seem so fancy :)
Let's start off with the conclusion:
The Danish news sites are very poor, when it comes to meeting the official W3C web standards. Out the 26 sites I tested only one came out clean (TV2), while Ekstra Bladet came out as the absolute worst with no less than 837 errors, and Berlingske Tidende in second with 613 errors.
Excluding the 4 sites that couldn't even be validated, the average error on a news site is 195 errors.
This is, as I see it, a serious problem. When a website doesn't live op to the standards, there's no way of telling, how it may appear in a browser. According to the French Xiti research, roughly 11 percent of the Danish population is using Firefox.
This makes website in compliance with the standards even more important, since Internet Explorer is known for accepting bad code, at least more than Firefox. This has meant that some sites look different in Firefox, or other alternative browsers, than in Internet Explorer.
So, it's important that the people responsible for the websites make sure that their peticular sites meets the standards!
Let's make good websites that can live up to the standards, instead of browsers who has to accept bad code!
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What I used in my short study:
1. Firefox
One browser to rule the all. No doubt one of the best web browsers out there.
2. Web Developer Extension
A neat extension for Firefox intended for web developers, but the rest of us can make good use of it as well!
3. W3C Validator
A simple validator, which tells you if your site is valid or not. The validator can be accessed directly from the site that's going to be validated by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+H (thank you Web Developer Extension :))
Then I selected 26 Danish news sites and you can see them listed below.
Download
You can also download the data, with doctype included, as a spreadsheet. It's in the OpenDocument file format, which is supported by a range of software, I recommend using the open office suite OpenOffice.org.
If you would just like to view the numbers, you can also download it as a PDF document.
| To download, right click and choose "Save target as" | |
| Download as spreadsheet | Download as PDF |
| Sites and number of errors | |
| Site | Errors |
| Altinget | 72 |
| Berlingske Tidende | 613 |
| BT | 81 |
| Børsen | 2 |
| ComON | 160 |
| Computerworld | 32 |
| Dagens Medicin | 20 |
| DR Nyheder | 75 |
| Ekstra Bladet | 837 |
| Erhvervsbladet | 37 |
| Fyens Stiftstidende | 33 |
| Information | 272 |
| Ingeniøren | 110 |
| Jyllands-Posten | 184 |
| JyskeVestkysten | 65 |
| Kristeligt Dagblad | Not valid |
| Lolland-Falsters Folketidende | Failed |
| Newspaq | 42 |
| Nordjyske | 366 |
| Politiken | 162 |
| Randers Amtsavis | 466 |
| SJ Nyheder | Failed |
| TV2 Nyhederne | 0 |
| Ugeskrift for Læger | 190 |
| Weekendavisen | Failed |
| Århus Stiftstidende | 471 |
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Tags: News sites