news

After about a week's use of Reeder for Mac (currently at 'Draft 4' status), I can finally ditch NetNewsWire, and confidently state that I would pay maybe something like $20 for this new Mac application.

NetNewsWire has always been a little slow, a little clunky, but at least it was reliable.

Reeder brings a lot of the simplicity of the iOS Reeder apps (both of which I have - Reeder for iPad and Reeder for iPhone) to desktop Macs. There are some odd UI glitches that are simple annoyances, but don't get in the way of my personal use of the app.

However, every new draft release brings with it more goodies, more polish, and more awesomesauce.

Petty and infantile, that's how I'd sum up the handling of a recent situation on the stltoday.com website (the website for the St. Louis Post Dispatch).

Kurt Greenbaum, after getting an anonymous commenter to resign his job [Ars Technica] when he looked up the commenter's IP address and ratted out the commenter to the school for which he worked, posted a little self-congratulatory post on the Post's website, as well as his personal blog.

Excerpt from the post:

I heard from the school’s headmaster. The school’s IT director took a shine to the challenge. Long story short: Using the time-frame of the comments, our website location and the IP addresses in the WordPress e-mail, he tracked it back to a specific computer. The headmaster confronted the employee, who resigned on the spot.

I'm not sure if Kurt understands the concept of anonymous posting and spam comments... on this little thing called the 'Internet,' people spam blogs and such with annoying, crass, rude, insensitive, and pointless drivel almost constantly. Even if you require people to be registered users / subscribers, you will get spam. You learn to deal with it. I could care less about the identity of anonymous commenters—and they should know they can always be tracked, to a certain extent—but the idea of selectively calling out certain commenters detracts from the idea of an 'open forum.' I've seen much more insulting and crass comments on the Post's website, so I don't know what got Mr. Greenbaum's feathers in such a kerfuffle.

You'd think the Post, a sanctuary for Catholic-bashing comments and radical vulgarity (in my experience), would either grin and bear the vulgar comment left by an anonymous commenter on the earlier post, or at most delete the comment and move on. Such should be the policy of a large news organization that leaves all their postings open to droves of anonymous commenters (a bad idea anyways, in my book).

After reading a few articles mulling over the implications of Rupert Murdoch's purported move to pull out all News Corp content from Google News, I thought I'd share a few thoughts, especially since the 'pay wall' issue is something I deal with from day to day with a local news publication...

Online Ads - a Faltering Art

With the popularity of Google Ads and other similar ad networks, where impressions are free, and clicks cost money, it's no surprise companies are hard-pressed to make any real money with this traditionally-based advertising medium. Heck, only 16% of Internet Users actually click on ads—that's not something the accountants and marketers are excited to hear, when all their business models are based on CTRs (click-through rates). Impression-based pricing is problematic, as well, especially considering the many different techniques people have for tricking ad-impression trackers.

There are a plethora of problems with online advertising metrics, and with revenue from online advertising. There are a few areas where online advertising is extremely effective (YouTube and other video sites have a successful pre-video commercial model, which works well). But for simple news and blog pages, the flashy, arrogant and often irrelevant ads that display in and around the content are largely ignored.

I don't propose any solutions to this huge problem—especially for news companies who, in the past, received more than half their revenue through advertising dollars. However, it's necessary to acknowledge the problem.

The Google Generation

Bing, Google, Yahoo - whatever the site is, online search and aggregation is the way of the future—I can count on one hand the number of people I know who have any particular website besides the three above (or one of their sub-sites) as their homepage. The fact is, people don't use the Internet as a replacement for the morning newspaper and bagel. People browse topics that interest them, then follow a topic around to different sources, and gather more information about this topic than was ever before possible in such a short period of time.

For years, I and other Catholic Saint Louisans have noted with sadness the often disgraceful anti-Catholic slant with which the St. Louis Post Dispatch writes. But until the past few years, the half-truths and boring/uninformed journalistic endeavor was limited to a single story or a single author in the print edition of the P-D. Now, unfortunately, the articles with which secular media (especially the Post) try to destroy Catholocism are a free range for hundreds of other anonymous anti-Catholic commenters.

Catholic News Live is a new site I've been working on - it is kinda-sorta out of the 'official public beta' status, although most of my sites are in perpetual beta as of late (most notably, Open Source Catholic!), but you can now check the About section of CNL for badges, follow @cathnewslive on Twitter, and subscribe to the many feeds.

Catholic News Live - a little site I whipped up yesterday afternoon. Still in early, early beta. If you're interested in joining and helping sort items into channels (and maybe other perks sooner or later), please email [email protected].