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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Top 5 Web Ideas Worth Stealing: The September IssueThursday, September 3, 2009 Alright already! No more bad headlines about “skinny” or “undernourished” September fashion issues. As we have reported in min and on minonline for weeks now, this dismal year for magazines has been very good for the digital side. Most brands upped their game considerably in 2009 to break out of the backwater many had occupied in the digital ecosystem for years. We have seen some good ideas flow both out of the magazine brands and from other Web content providers in recent months. And so it is time once again for our rundown of ideas we think you should pilfer, rip off, copy like a cat and reuse shamelessly at other sites.  Be the Feed: MTV’s relaunch yesterday was more of a PR event than a substantial redo…except for one cool feature. The Daily Fresh is offered as “Hand Picked Treats from MTV and Beyond.” This center column beneath the site’s carousel marquee surfaces the best new items on the MTV family of sites and calls attention to other great found objects on the Web at large. The blend is very satisfying. This is a great way to apply your own editorial posse’s sensibilities to the entire Web. It is also a great way to drive users into specific areas of the site. For instance, one entry ran a classic MTV News interview with Madonna that was crashed by a hammered Courtney Love. They just don’t make celebrity smackdowns like that anymore. Better still, once the clip whets your appetite for old MTV, a nearby link drives you into the MTV news vaults. This is a smart way to be a curator for users and also highlight undiscovered areas. Still missing from Daily Fresh is an RSS link so people can pull in the updates. .jpg) NYTimes Drive-By Ads: Over the years a number of publishers have experimented with the concept of letting users choose their sponsor. Most notably, the Weatherbug desktop application had customers pick an advertiser from among 10 choices that would provide the skin to its memory-resident weather monitor. In the past few weeks, the NYTimes mobile application started running interstitial ad units from tech partner Medialets that literally put the user in the advertising driver’s seat. Turn a news page and suddenly your iPhone transforms into a driving game where you course through a field of billboards. Tap the one that looks appealing and the advertiser’s pitch appears in its own page. Lessons learned? If you are going to intrude on the reader’s experience in order to serve an invasive ad, then at least make it fun and give the user a sense of control over the experience.  TheWrap’s Deal Central Widget: Business information publishers would do well to visit the redesign at the Web-only entertainment industry b2b site TheWrap for one of the coolest little widgets we have seen lately. The Deal Central widget pulls together all of the major Hollywood deals involving people, companies and projects into an at-a-glance tool. The interactive widget lets you move through tabs to see deals indexed by category. In essence, the tool takes the most useful information TheWrap offers professionals in the biz and shrinks it into a usable package. Unfortunately, the tool does not persist on every page of the site, nor is it a true portable widget that the user could plant on their MyYahoo or iGoogle page, a blog or even suck into an RSS feed. Now that would be Oscar-worthy.  DailyMe: Transparency can be a powerful thing. What if publishers tried being more transparent with visitors about their own on-site behavior? DailyMe, the personalized news service, relaunched last month with a new Newstogram feature that lets users see a visualization of their own recent content consumption and even helps them declare preferences so the system can personalize news delivery. The tool is a novel kind of navigation, because users can drill further into topics they didn’t even realize interested them. The personalization piece engages the visitor in managing her own editorial experience. Although it would be difficult to implement, this kind of functionality could become truly powerful if it followed the user across multiple sites. If a paid content project like Steve Brill’s Journalism Online succeeds in selling subscriptions to bundles of partnered content, then a personalization tool like DailyMe’s could be made a great value-add that gives the user greater control and transparency in news gathering.  A Webisodic That Works: In the long, tortured history of made-for-Web video series, only a handful stand out as watchable, let alone admirable. In almost all of their recent iterations, webisodic series use the video chat format itself as the main motif. Guess what? Guy talking to camera has a limited range of creative possibilities. But along comes Friends veteran Lisa Kudrow as the thoroughly believable, self-absorbed online therapist who deigns to give her patients five-minute sessions via webcam. The “WebTherapy” conceit may wear thin for us in a few months, but Kudrow’s comic chops combine with smart scripts to make this a genuine satire of personality, medium and culture. It shows how the short-form Web video format can work when it has a strong and simple premise, real acting and scripts that develop the main theme rather than drive it into the ground. Like burglars in the night, we are on the lookout for good Web ideas worth stealing. If you have a nomination for future installments, send us a note. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com
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