Now to discuss how Web 2.0 (you might have heard of it) could help us in making our Canvas site. Looking at what works on conventional news sites has helped me to consider what may be effective for us.

Comments: As Web 2.0 is all about interactivity, it makes sense to include a way of getting feedback from visitors. After discussing this we decided the best way for this would be to include a ‘leave comment’ section after each article or story. By doing this it allows two way interactivity, i.e. it is not just us telling people things with no feedback. Users will also be able to discuss issues which affect them – keeping the discussion in the relevant place.

RSS Feeds: All news sites have plenty of RSS feeds, so even if it is just to keep Canvas in line with other sites then these would be good to include. Obviously, as Canvas comes out only every few months it does not generate enough copy to warrant having its own feeds. A way we can work around this could be selecting other feeds relevant to the subject matter of our site, such as a feed for national student news.

Multimedia content: We can certainly use multimedia to our advantage and, indeed, was one of the main ways we discussed as to how we can use Canvas online to extend what is in Canvas the newspaper. In a paper, you cannot add video content or slideshows, but online you can. It is also a tried and tested way of breaking up pages of text to stop the reader becoming bored. So we will certainly looking to embed videos, probably as sidebar content. In the ‘your union’ page we will use flash to display photos of union events as a slideshow.

Blogs: We briefly discussed including blogs on the site, either blogs for the individual writers or as a ‘Canvas online blog’. Blogs are a good way of complementing traditional news writing with opinion, provoking further debate and increasing user interest which, in turn will lead to more traffic to the site. We decided early on not to include a blog straight away but discuss it again once the site was established.

Search: We talked about including an in-site search engine so users can search to find content they require. I have looked on other sites and find search engines a very important tool to make a site easier to navigate. This said, due to the small amount of content we originally need to navigate, this feature is not necessary at the moment.

A new task means I have to write a competitor analysis of a general news site. You’ll be pleased to know I have been given the website of… The Daily Mirror! If it’s anywhere near as good as the newspaper then I’ll be here for hours discussing its qualities… OK, enough sarcasm – onto the analysis.

As the title suggests, I will look at how mirror.co.uk uses Web 2.0 to engage its readers. At first glance it made me wonder if when the Internet gods were handing out 2.0 features, The Mirror’s web team were too busy in their caves. A further look, however, and I began to notice the way this site has taken advantage.

The key thing when it comes to Web 2.0 is ‘interactivity’. In basic terms, it is a way for websites to allow more creativity in the way they interact with their users to create community among them. How exactly does mirror.co.uk do this? Read on and you shall be enlightened with my (innovative, I know) use of subheadings:

Content
First things first, how does The Mirror’s site take advantage of Web 2.0 in their stories they include? A much harder question to answer than I first thought… Well, there are links to related articles, all stories are categorised under sections, the content is basically just copied from the newspaper. Nothing new there then, but wait, what’s this…?

Social Bookmarking
This little button at the bottom of articles – under the adverts – is a little feature called social bookmarking. The idea is if you like the article then you can share it with your friends on networking sites such as Facebook, or you can bookmark it for use on another computer, i.e. at work. Now, The Mirror should really make this feature more obvious because, once expanded, it is actually very vast with a huge amount of bookmarks available:

So while this is really the only Web 2.0 feature that the articles themselves have, there are others elsewhere on the site.

RSS Feeds
Really Simple Syndication Feeds is a Web 2.0 invention that allows users to subscribe to updates of a certain type – be it news, blog updates or any other. Mirror.co.uk does have a large amount of these though, again, seem to be somewhat hidden. Finding a needle in a haystack is a piece of cake after this. Ok, I’m exaggerating, but I did struggle. I eventually saw one pop up three-quarters of the way down the section home pages on the right hand side, did I mention it was hidden? Anyway, you click on the ‘RSS Feed’ link and the rest is simple. “But what about a list of all the feeds?” I hear you ask… well, being the Web Guru that I am I discovered that going to the ’sitemap’ brings up the full list of all 36 RSS feeds available – no need to thank me:

It is undeniable that these feeds are a good tool of Web 2.0, keeping users close to the site, and mirror.co.uk certainly utilises them, but it needs to be made clearer in order to work better.

Back to the homepage and a little scroll down, searching for 2.0 stuff… aha! Now this is more like it:
Mirror TV

Bizarrely placed, smack in the middle of the homepage after a scroll down – is Mirror TV. This is the exact sort of thing that needs to be done to take advantage of Web 2.0. Put simply, Mirror TV is the news in video, displayed on their own custom made Flash Viewer. Everything is grouped under four headings; News, sports, showbiz and Mirror exclusives, with a scrollbar on the right side listing the videos. It even has a search and a fullscreen option. It is very self-explanatory and is a major step from just repurposing copy from the newspaper. Believe it or not, it is rather impressive and is only held back by its ridiculous placement on the homepage due to there being no ‘Mirror TV’ option in the site menu. All in all, very Web 2.0

Forums
Another big aspect of Web 2.0 is to involve the users in content, so for news sites some use comment boxes after each story to get immediate opinions. Mirror.co.uk does not do this, instead it tries to use a forum to get debate going from its readers. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work quite like they hope, for a start it is not clear they want you to respond on the forum as it doesn’t suggest to underneath the article. Instead, the forum is more a general news/showbiz debate and doesn’t really refer back to mirror.co.uk. While it is a good idea to have a forum for community purposes, I would suggest also having an option to comment on stories to keep debate on topic.

Another thing worth mentioning – but not worthy of its own subheading, is the blog. Most news sites fully utilise blogs with their journalists writing opinion rather than regular news stories, again sparking debate among their community of readers. This site does have them but I challenge you to find them easily, they are hardly advertised so I imagine The Mirror doesn’t think they are important. Sad, because blogs are just another way of making a site Web 2.0 friendly.

Altogether mirror.co.uk does use an awful lot of Web 2.0 features, however I cannot commend the site on the way they are used. The tools are there for the user to fully engage in the site and with a lot of tweaking they may be able to make that so. But for now, it is just too difficult for a regular user to grasp the features on the site and so I will not recommend mirror.co.uk as a news site that can utilise the Web 2.0 features available to them.

mirror.co.uk – Web 2.0 or no?…. erm, yes and no…

Well, here I am again. Clearly I have grown bored of blogger and have joined the world of the pasty white guys in their caves… I am on WordPress.

Alright, enough of that, what is this blog about? You will all (and I’m sure there’s loads of you) be delighted to know that once again I will be chronicling the events of my learning. But there’s a difference, (Hallelujah) I will also log the exciting events of my print class!

So for those of you who are still here… it’s time to learn about the massively challenging task of working through semester four – whilst still holding onto a social life. I’m sure you wish me well.

So our first task of the new Semester is to begin creating a website for our student newspaper – Canvas. Before that, though, I will take a look at some other websites that come under the category – RIVALS!

Firstly, I found Nouse. This is the University of York’s website for their newspaper and I have to say, in general, it comes across as a very well laid out site, not dissimilar from The Guardian website and in fact, might well have been modelled on this.

It is not clear, at first glance, whether it is actually the website for their student paper, but scrolling down the home page you will find the archive in PDF format which suggests it is.

The site has some of the features that we talked about in class. The navigation bar has, I assume, the same categories which appear in the paper version, which allows someone to go through the site in a similar way as they would the paper. Another thing we had previously discussed was adding multimedia as an extension to the paper – this has been done on Nouse with the inclusion of Podcasts. They can add news this way allowing another dimension which is worth looking at for us I think.

A downside to Nouse is that by including a lot on their homepage, it becomes very cluttered and, in my opinion, are better off confining most things on this page to their relevant section – keeping the home page for the latest updates perhaps.

The second website I looked at was Varsity. This is the website of the Cambridge students’ paper. It is Cambridge so of course I expect big things from this one.

I was right to, I guess the huge range of subjects on offer at Cambridge allows for a large combined effort, so I think for us, we can learn a lot from looking at this site.

What first stood out for me, was the much more concise home page, with just a few articles/features on display, it immediately becomes much more pleasing to look at than Nouse.

The individual categories: news, sports etc, are laid out with the main story surrounded by the rest, which I like a lot and it seems as though lots of effort has gone into planning the design of the site.

The stories throughout the site are laid out in columns, like they would be in print, which suggests they want the website to be kept close to the paper, more or less as an add-on. After our discussions in class it seems as if we want to be a lot more than our paper, so perhaps columns would be a good feature to avoid.

Both sites have the pages on .pdf – making me think it is a good idea to do this from the InDesign files rather than spend time typing them all up, allowing us to re-purpose some of our articles and not all of them.