Text is not Dead

If we continue with Courtney’s earlier notion, which we discussed in class, that browsing the internet is akin to window shopping, then video is a website’s window display. Corey Lopardi makes the very interesting point that video on websites is far more powerful than any other kind of advertising because it’s interactive.

Unlike commercials on television, which are a passive form of advertising, viewers see web videos because they choose to watch them. This makes them more receptive to your message. By clicking on your video they’re giving you the permission to inform and entertain them. Video is a great way to explain important or complicated procedures in a simple visual manner that your customers can understand.

Though in thinking of a hyperlocal website, the idea of being able to “explain important or complicated” or even advertise as a whole may not necessarily be a priority… or is it. News is a product. Many people are selling it; some are giving it away, but one cannot escape the fact that it is a commodity. If people like the product they will return for more because they trust the brand. Being a person’s main source of news is as important for a company to have a loyal customer. So, I think it’s important to continually think of the readers of the news as consumers, consumers who we want to return.

One of the most important things for a company to first establish is traffic to the store, or in our case, the site. Video is not only entertaining, but also, it provides the site with a far higher likelihood of being picked up by a search agent. Let’s face it, if the site isn’t coming up on a Google search, it may as well not exist. Lopardi explains this effect of video:

Web videos also help to insure that your website will be seen by others. Most search engines now include web video in their evaluating of a websites value, which directly relates to the site’s search engine placement. Like photos, blogs, and text, web video now weighs in heavily when search engines decide how high in their placement to list a site. Videos can also be placed on hosting sites like YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo and others to drive potential customers all over the world to your website.

A blog on Outerbox Design points out that having video on a site will sometimes “double the time a visitor spends on that page.” He explains how this will inevitable increase the site’s conversion rate. Now, the customer has become more than someone who browsed the window displays. He or she has come into the store and has been intrigued enough to look through the inventory.

One may ask how much video should a news site have, especially one that aims to be taken seriously. Journalism.org looked at three major, highly rated, news sites and studied their home pages for two hours. CNN had 29 video links, 20 were recorded and edited site videos, 2 were user generated, and 7 were live videos. MSNBC had 45, all of which were recorded and edited. And, Fox News had 31; 25 of them were recorded and edited, and 6 were live feeds. These numbers do not even take into consideration podcasts. This is not my way of saying, well, other sites are doing it too! But… they are. While these mammoth sites are not the direct competition of the hyperlocal ones, they do set a standard and become a model of what people want and expect when they search for news online.

Ever since people have gone to the internet for news, they have desired for it to be more entertaining. The internet was such an excitingly different platform from newsprint. The web content, the quality of the writing, the efficiency of the layout are all extremely important to the success of a site, but video gets them in the door and entices them to stay a little while.

In exploring the State of the Media website, I was immediately drawn to the section on developing trends. The nature of new media begs an avid watcher of growing trends because getting even a little out of date is unacceptable in the industry. Journalists, bloggers, and writers who are on top of Facebook, Twitter, and Digg will bulldoze over those who haven’t adopted the networks. What immediately interested me was the notion of the individual voice becoming as valuable and legitimate as that of a vetted journalist. I think of this movement as the quintessential double-edged sword. Every writer having an equal voice and space to speak allows those who would otherwise be locked out of the industry to have a fighting chance at gaining an audience. It also provides readers a widespread selection of viewpoints and opinions. But readers must immediately acquire an advanced filter; otherwise, significant writing can get lost in the murky collection of everyone else’s text. Then again, who is the judge of what is significant and important? Should a judge exist when the Internet has no gatekeeper for contributors of text, or is that the beauty of it?

This section of The State of the Media on trends describes the issue clearly:

But for a few journalists at least, there are signs of a new prospect: individual journalists, funded by a mix of sources, offering expert coverage to many places. The movement offers the possibility of more skilled reporting from the field. Yet it would also require consumers to be discriminating and raises questions about how news organizations would ensure quality and reliability.

An article I found is stunningly relative considering it was written well over a year ago. Lisa Williams terms herself as a citizen journalist who watched fellow journalist experience what she describes as the print media career equivalent to The Titanic. In her point of view, those locked into the dying aspect of the industry could only await their inevitable demise while those who understood the fatality of the iceberg boarded lifeboats they had to steer themselves.

As the web, software, and news become a single industry, the stability and security we knew when our founding institutions were big and strong are gone and will never return. Gone with them are the sclerotic bureaucracy. Gone with them is the feeling of giving up changing anything because you can’t even figure out how many people to ask for permission. All of these and more are as dead as IBM’s dress code of blue blazer, red tie, white shirt.

One of the most encouraging aspects of her piece is that in spite of the trend of everyone with a connection to the Internet having equal weight and an equal chance to acquire an audience, those who jumped from the sinking ship at least have experience in the waters.

Wikipoogle- why go anywhere else? If Wikipedia has an article regarding that topic, googling it will show it without asking you to scroll past five entries. The two entities are partners in the page-rank war. They are the power players. Google is ten years old, and Wikipedia is seven; in Internet years, this relationship has lasted quite a while. Our daily life has morphed into a break-neck-paced, visually overwhelming stream of information plugging into a person using all outlets. Our desk computers, laptops, phones, Blackberry’s, and PDAs keep us connected quickly and constantly. When something happens, whether that something is Anna Nichole Smith’s untimely death or McCain’s VP pick, the internet shows no prejudice, and it delivers the news before the story is even complete.

How does this evolution affect the ever-changing Internet surfer, who googles his or her way along the campaign? The average attention span of someone searching for something on the Internet does not allow him or her the willpower and stamina to view all the endless pages of a search result. Getting to the end of the pages on a popular topic, such as Obama, holds the same futile mystery as finding out what is on every channel when someone has the three-hundred-channel cable package. We just can’t know everything, and we couldn’t begin to try. It’s information overload. Therefore, we reluctantly trust the wisdom of Google to provide the most reliable and best sources on the first or second page. As a student, would you do a research paper using books someone else checked out of the library, sources someone else decided were the best, these few choices from walls and walls of titles. Why do we trust a search engine to do the same? The answer is because Wikipedia speaks the fast-pasted language of the time-constrained surfer who still needs to know. It has everything and links to everything it used a source. It’s quick, convenient, easy to remember, written on a below average reading level, and generally holds short entries that don’t try the attention span.

The Google generation bred the demand for a source such as Wikipedia. Nicholas Carr writes on the need to explore the way the Internet and this media is programming the users in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He cites Maryanne Wolfe’s notion that deep reading is tied to deep thinking. Deep reading is of course nonexistent and entirely unnecessary when reading, more like skimming, the information surrounded by ads, pop-ups, games, and links, blinking and glowing in competition for the viewer’s attention. The pervasive thread in his piece is that the human brain is exposed to the google power, which will spawn “hyperactive, data-stroked minds,” which will lead to a race of what Richard Foreman calls the “pancake people… spread wide and thin.”

Dawn Teo writes in her post on the Huffington Post that Americans are widely under-informed about the election. She writes to promote the idea that political activists must accept this fact and share the light, so to speak. Essentially, she supports her stance that Americans are disengaged with the web traffic map. The blogs, political columns, and You Tube serve as distractions from the main sources of valuable information. The informed must reach out to the uninformed, the ones who lean on Google and Wikipedia.

Is Google Making Us Stupid? Well, no, it’s making us adapt to an instant information-charged life. And that doesn’t necessarily make us smarter.