Manoratha

...news is getting shorter all the time

http://news.com.com/Reading+phone+text+one+word+at+a+time/2100-1046_3-5785579.html?tag=st.prev

In India, Rediff.com, a portal that many consumers access through cell phones, the company is working on ways to restructure news stories to make them more palatable on mobile devices. One idea, already implemented, involves writing quick summaries of news stories and drastically limiting the length of news stories.

Brings to mind a recent discussion I had with Smita about evolution of news stories as presented in magazines and newspapers over the last three decades that I have been reading critically.  The NYTimes and WSJ are the only newspapers where articles demand that you sit and read stories vs. just scan them (though the local San Jose Mercury News will occasionally do a set of long pieces that merit mention). 

Having depth and dimension to an article encourages me to graze rather than snack on the information.  The grazing leads to a wholly different experience of the material than the snacking. The reading medium interacts with the content to shape our reading habits and as we shift from paper to the screen as the primary medium, it is changing reading habits.  Reading used to be a contemplative activity and now seems more like a game of competitive flash-cards. 

The curmedgeon is feels pessimistic sometimes.  Its nice to know that for all that, Smita and I have at least with my teen, brought up a reader who does appreciate the long graze to the quick snack despite her immersion in a modern MTV styled world with a short attention span.  Perhaps the nightly ritual of reading to her and letting her thoughts ramble around the material had something to do with it...

Death and dying...

News of the passing of Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.  She wrote in her book "On Death and Dying -What the Dying have to teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy and their own Families" of the stages of grief : denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.  She was also spokesperson for palliative care.

Abraham Verghese writing in the WSJ about Dr. Kubler-Ross says "(On Death and Dying) has a wonderful passage on what the dying can teach the living (in the medical profession) - You don't have to have a cure to heal someone...".  A wonderfully written tribute to Dr. Kubler-Ross. 

Reading layout and ads

I like ads.  They provide a mild distraction (sometimes even relevant) and add some oomph to dry text on web pages.  The layout, if well designed makes the text easier to scan/read.  The problem with the ad industry is that they crossed a threshold some years ago where the use of pop-ups/unders, animations and ad-sizes got to a point where I invested in a commercial ad-filter to ban ads all together (AdSubtract and AdMuncher).

In the good old days, I was actually happy to have the ads and even clicked through on some of them until the pop-us and animation started.  I have a particular distaste for things moving around on a page that I'm trying to read.  I have therefore been running ad-free for a few years now and noticed something odd - My ad-free pages have been getting "harder" to read.

This is because the ads that are clipped out leave large amounts of vacat space that still distracts but without the reward (I have been using Ad-Subtract Pro & AdMuncher to filter pop-ups, moving ads and other assorted vermin).

As an experiment, I tweaked the ad-filter to allow ads but banish animation but I'm afraid to say that the results weren't very good.  The production quality on the ads and the size at which they are delivered makes them the centerpiece of the page instead of the poorly produced text that I'm trying to read.  Is there hope?

A recent ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) issue had an interesting article on automated layout systems.  Wouldn't it be nice to have an intelligent personal layout agent that sucks in the poorly designed pages you're cruising and reformat them into your reading format of choice (a nice 3 column layout, newspaper like and efficient).  Startup anyone?

Opening lines...

A quote from E.L. Doctorow (paraphrased):

Writing a novel is like travelling down a dark highway in a car.  You can't see where you came from or your destination, your visibility on the sides is also limited but you can see far enough in front of you to keep going towards your destination.