1. Newsvine.com’s “news in pictures”

Newsvine.com, one of my favorite sites to post, learn and expand on shared news and entertainment information recently added a ‘news in pictures’ section to their homepage.

While I’m all for introducing (and enticing click-thru) news stories via a photo instead of a headline, the poor choice of photos has gotten me down.

The screenshot below shows Yesterday’s (June 28, 2007) ‘news in pictures’ default display, with two of the photos in the slideshow being obscure references to some cat-based story*. Again, showing photos in place of news headlines in order to increase click-thru is a great idea, but seriously, can the cat photos be considered ‘news?’

It appears the photos are loaded from some AP/Wire service, and the choice of which are added to the homepage must be limited.

2. Mint vs. Google Analytics.

vs.

I was going to write a post about Mint vs. Google Analytics, but it appears that David Seah has done a great job doing just that.

3. Dealing with clients as a freelancer - the most valuable guide I’ve found to-date.

FreelanceSwitch: 12 breeds of client and how to deal with them.

So Justine is still working (for the next few weeks at least) as a freelancer. While I envy her freedoms, I don’t envy her relationships. Thankfully, Justine has scored some dream clients, far from those mentioned on the linked post. Still, I’m glad that someone put together a ‘most-common’ attributes list of freelance client-types. I can’t tell you how valuable I’ve found this list already - and I am barely working freelance on the side!

Awhile back, Mike Davidson wrote about pagination and page-view juicing. He made several points I highly agree with, the largest in regard to reasonable screen real-estate online and how we (as visitors) are less concerned with scrolling than having to load multiple pages (bandwidth, time, etc).

While many sites (I’m sure) split long articles into multiple pages for page-view juicing, it’s a highly obtrusive practice that I think should be sent to the bin.

Thankfully, Wired.com seems to have found a nice middle-ground. While they still split their articles into multiple pages (see screenshot below), they also include a ‘Full page’ link that reloads the current article into one long document.

For me, this is a great way to please both the advertising sales department and your site visitors - you still get at least one more reload of the page (perhaps with differently sized advertising?*), and visitors get to read the entire article in one take.

*Sadly, Wired.com did not change the advertising beyond what appears to be an ad-rotation schedule. With a format change, I’ve always stated that there’s great opportunity to change the advertisements - further with changes if the article is printed. What value does a ‘click here to hear the audio on this Flash animated ad’ do for me when I’ve printed an article in black and white? For the love of pete, people, please create an advertising vehicle that will create valuable printed advertising, or delete the worthless online-only ads from my laser prints!

I will say this for Wired.com: When printing the article in question, the ‘print-view’ presented did show a banner ad (again, worthless if printed), but the actual printed copy was stripped of advertising, comments, and header/footers. Good job there! Even so, why are sites still ignoring the tips for printing from Alistapart.com (and another)? Of course, the holy-grail for me (beyond better, relevant advertising) is the print-formatted links (either using footnotes or inline).

Update: If you look at the homepage (or sort by the iPhone category) you’ll get some more updated posts on the iPhone progress (and my success/failure at some features). 

So Macrumors.com reported the other day on some leaked Apple iPhone sales literature, highlighting the glaring disabilities of what should be the world’s most-capable phone.The largest injustice to me is the lack of support for MMS messaging (multimedia). Since I use a Blackberry, I only use MMS (in place of SMS) about one-tenth of my messaging time. Even so, my simple Blackberry supports the sending and receiving of MMS messages while the OS X, wi-fi and EDGE enabled iPhone does not. Adding insult to injury, the iPhone includes a 2mp camera!Further frustration comes from the keynote yesterday where Apple announced their “support” of developers, only to ridiculously pawn “support” as “your development will be through Ajax and Web 2.0″ as Web pages using the Safari browser.To me, that’s not application support, that’s a continuation of a browser experience on a small platform. I had high hopes for developing an OSNAP.net application that tied into the camera, the maps, and the wi-fi/EDGE capabilities, but now it appears I’m stuck in a browser environment. Shoddy if you ask me when the phone has been advertised as a full version of OS X device - a mini-Mac, if you will.Many tech-savy people I’ve spoken with about the iPhone have said they’ll wait for a version 2 of the iPhone before deciding on a purchase. It is their hopes (and mine) that Apple will make suffucient changes to the phone’s experience, and either more plan options - or ideally, more carriers - will appear.So, my recommendation: Like myself, I’d recommend you wait for a revision 2. The price may be lower, more carriers available, and some missing features may be introduced. Another good reason to wait for a revision 2? If the iPhone doesn’t get the support or saturation necessary, then you might end up with a lackluster (if not expensive) hunk of plastic that’s no longer supported by your carrier - it wouldn’t be the first time Apple or a cellphone provider dropped support for their devices.

So I was reading the June 2007 issue of Windows IT Pro (a Penton publication), a section called ‘Getting to know Office 2007′ when I came across this question and answer:

Q: My HTML email messages don’t appear properly in Outlook 2007, yet they display correctly in Outlook 2000. What’s different?

A: Outlook 2007 uses a different rendering engine than its predecessors… Unless the situation changes, keep the following limitations in mind if you want your email messages to display properly for Outlook 2007 users:

• no support for background images (HTML or Cascading Style Sheets - CSS)
• no support for forms
• no support for Flash or other plug-ins
• no support for CSS floats
• no support for replacing bullets with images in unordered lists
• no support for CSS positioning
• no support for animated GIF files

Now, while this list looks grim, Gmail is nearly as bad. I recommend you take a look at Campaign Monitor’s CSS checklist. They have some great information (as well as other blog posts - specifically the one about how Microsoft set e-mail back 5 years with Outlook 2007).

So, back to my question, why do we tolerate? As someone that needs to send direct-email (for clients and for my own company) from time to time, I find it increasingly difficult to produce rich, engaging mail pieces. I’m not interested in sales or in sending spam, I’m talking direct, opt-in or customer based messages and invoices. My clients expect rich messages (I work in music and entertainment), and in some situations, rich e-mail is called for.In the corporate environment that Microsoft (in my opinion) seems to be targeting, plain-text, or ‘guarded’ e-mail may be the focus, but shouldn’t the display of media be a choice of the application’s user?