This Digital Life :: MinOnline

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This Digital Life
Steve Smith

On an information superhighway where editorial innovation merges with unpredictable user tastes and inexplicable viral outbreaks, you see a lot of curious things along the way. In the past year, magazines online created some novel properties and were themselves on the receiving end of weird traffic tsunamis as visitors showed a taste for the oddest things.

Slate Pioneers Pod-Text

Slate.com is one of the oldest and still among the most innovative sites online. But with its new “textcasting” version the Today’s Paper news summary, it gets downright funky. Developed by editor Andy Bowers, the new delivery method downloads the text version of the article to an iPod. Instead of an audio or video show (which Slate also offers) the iPod item clicks into a long text scroll. Is this little experiment a bit too clever by half? Not according to launch sponsor Lexus, which helped underwrite the project. What comes next, Morse Code-casts via cell phone?

Even Her Hats are Famous

A decade after he death, Princess Diana still sells magazines for publishers like no one else on the planet…ever. But when the quasi-official Doyens of Di, People, ran its package commemorating the 10th Anniversary of Princess Diana’s death, even they were surprised by the result. What was the most popular online feature? Her clothes? She and the little Princes? Nope. It was hats. A Diana’s many hats left all other parts of the package behind and drew 19 million page views.

Ready…Set…Harvest

Several years after it first launched as a novelty on Agriculture.com, the Combine Combat game remains so popular that agribusiness visitors are not discouraged by the fact that the site doesn’t even provide active links to it anymore. “[It] can only be found through a site search, yet it maintains its status as a top twenty most popular page this year,” says editor John Walter.
“Fun content like that can have a lot of stickiness, almost more than you want,” he says.

I Wish I Had Said That

How does an erudite monthly literary and men’s style magazine brand like Esquire turn itself into a relevant mobile Web destination? Well, first, it doesn’t try too hard to seem relevant. Like a smooth operator at a swanky bar, Esquire Mobile comes at us sideways with “Laws of Fashion” and a drinks database. “Is it necessary to anyone else’s life?” muses editor David Granger. “I don’t know.” The rake! Actually, this year Esquire Mobile showed us that you don’t have to be up-to-the-minute to be fun on a handset. Its “70 Greatest Sentences” trove of great lines from the magazine’s history is one of the most compelling pieces of mobile content we saw all year. Where else on a phone will you get Capote? To wit:
“For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap-and-lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening of the cheeks.”
Yeah, what he said.

The Delicate Art of the Swimsuit Model

Who would have guessed that sports fans are such devotees of fine painting? When SI.com dropped its monster swimsuit issue franchise on the Web this year, the 40 million page views to the feature were coming in so fast the server was still counting them the next day, recalls managing editor Paul Fichtenbaum. But as in years past, one of the surprising draws was the “Bodypainting” section. “People love bodypainting,” says Fichtenbaum. This year, four models had rock-and-roll t-shirts finely drawn on them. The famous Rolling Stones lips logo on Marissa Miller’s front was especially popular. “It connected on a couple of levels,” says Fichtenbaum. Yeah, we don’t know art. We just know what we like.

Golf.com’s TomKat Moment

People and Us Weekly aren’t the only books online to burn the servers with celebrity photo scoops. Golf.com took in the eyeballs this year when it was the first major golf site to feature pictures of Tiger and Elin Woods’ new baby. Deputy editor David Dusek recalls pretty much tripping over them when he was checking Tiger’s personal Web site, TigerWoods.com, for some updates. “Lo and behold, on June 25th there were five or six baby photos on the site.” Shot by a photographer for the Wireimage service to which Golf.com had a license, they quickly erected a gallery. The images nabbed almost 1.5 million page views on the first day and a couple of million more over the next few days. “It was something falling into your lap,” says Dusek. “You don’t expect to be handed that many page views.”

If You Lose Your Virginity in Second Life, Does It Count?

In June, Playboy launched its own retail and social location in 3D virtual world Second Life. Using SL’s unique mode of travel, any of the two million or so members of the alternative universe can teleport over to Playboy Island, where they can purchase branded merchandise either for delivery in the real world or as apparel for their online avatars. Of course, the stores are run by avatar Bunnies, and we are guessing that the “social space” provided for SL residents is the closest thing to the infamous mansion “grotto” we get here. And Hef? No sign of him. But hasn’t he been living in a virtual world all along

This Old Wreck

In 2006, This Old House magazine was doing a standard home inspection checklist story when the American Society of Home Inspectors sent a press release with an aside on some of the funny and horrible sights inspectors had seen over the years. “Home Inspection Nightmares” started as an online sidebar, but this photo gallery of propped up basements, jerry-rigged plumbing, and flipped-out patch-jobs took flight among DIY bloggers. ASHI and TOH created a franchise: seven installments that now pull in over four million page views.

The Ickiness of the Long Distance Runner

Just when we thought that Diana’s hats and Rube Goldberg plumbing jobs were the creepiest things we saw all year, an unexpected bit of weirdness sprinted in from RunnersWorld.com. Straight from the Department of Ewwww, one of the strangest recent traffic spikes to Rodale’s site came from a blog post involving a necklace made of toenails. Things must get a little strange out there at the 75 mile point of a 100-mile run, because marathoner Scott Dunlap turned his and others’ lost toenails into a necklace. When RunnersWorld editor Mark Remy linked to it in his new blog, it had that (dare we say) viral effect only the Web can provide

2007 Diggs 2002

At ScientificAmerican.com this year, 2002 was the big hit of 2007. The most popular single article at the site was a five-year old magazine feature by editor-in-chief John Renne, “15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense.” Social media site Digg was the single greatest source of the 500,000 page views of traffic the reprinted article amassed this year. When an authoritative brand takes a stand on a key issue, the influence can run deep and evergreen.

Britney? Que Es Britney?

Britney Spears’ infamous meltdown performance at the MTV Music Awards was manna from traffic heaven for most entertainment sites this fall, including PeopleenEspanol.com. But nothing at the site compares to readers’ apparent obsession with the pregnancy of Mexican pop star Thalia. Photo galleries of the ever-expanding singer have racked up 300,000 page views in the English version and another 300,000 in the Spanish iteration. Interestingly, about a third of PeopleenEspanol.com readers actually opt to read the bi-lingual site in English.

User-Generated Warbling

Hallmark.com, which we don’t tend to associate with strange user-generated vid-cam moments, gave us one of the funniest entries in the new online video category. To accompany a June print article on celebrations in Hallmark Magazine, editor-in-chief Lisa Berenson’s crew hit the streets to interview women on their favorite song to sing at these parties. Berenson says she is still chuckling at the sight of “middle-aged women bellowing ‘What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?’” This has got startup potential written all over it. Senior YouTube.

All Is Fair in Love and Blind Dates

Leave it to Cosmopolitan.com to add a particularly ruthless strategy to the predatory female’s portfolio. The Cosmo mobile site offers “Fake Calls” that can be programmed to rescue you from a bad date with a phony emergency phone call. Choose from a menu that includes a French lover professing his passion or a locked out roommate. The recordings include suitable pauses for you to commiserate and drop the inevitable, “Be right over,” leaving your loser lothario with an empty chair…and the check.

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