Times launches seamless hypertext
There's an interesting new hypertext feature in the New York Times. Double-clicking any word or phrase in a story triggers a popup with one or more dictionary and/or encyclopedia references.
The Times rolled this out without any fanfare I know of. The only indication is an easy-to-miss sentence tacked on the bottom.
The source of the information is Answers.com. An earlier incarnation of the system, which debuted last September, was a bit clunky. It required the reader to hold down the ALT key while clicking on a word.
The system has some smarts. Adjacent words are scanned to factor in context. For example, an otherwise unelaborated reference to “Ike and Kay” in Maureen Dowd’s column last week correctly popped up President Eisenhower – not Tina Turner’s abusive husband.
The system is far from perfect.
Clicking on “News Corporation” in the second paragraph of today’s story, “Murdoch is Taking MySpace to China,’’ yielded only dictionary definitions of “news” or “corporation” – not the company.
Worse, the feature doesn’t appear to work with stories once they’re filed into the older-than-seven-days archive.
Despite the shortcomings, I’m impressed. The ease with which readers can look up unfamiliar words provides a welcomed retort to editors demanding all stories be dumbed down to a fifth-grade vocabulary.
Comments
I've heard of news described as the loss leader that gets you on the car lot, or the free toaster they used to give away at the bank if you opened an account. Selling eyeballs to advertisers is what we're all about.
We know that, but our readers don't.
Subscribers DO think they're paying for news and at a couple hundred bucks a year, it sure FEELS like they're paying for it.
And as we shrink their paper and hike their prices, they may also FEEL like they're getting less while paying more and it's hard to argue they're wrong about that.
Reading a newspaper FEELS like you paid for news, even if it was just 50 cents.
Reading it online FEELS like you're getting news for free, even though, as you note, you've paid for a computer and a monthly internet bill. And you get a lot of other stuff that FEELS free with your monthly internet bill, too: email, shopping, social networks, porn, entertainment, games, music, data, maps, porn, sports scores, search engines, tickets, porn etc.
Does it matter how people feel about their investment in the news? Does it matter to advertisers if readers feel like they paid for it or if they feel like they're getting if for free? I dunno. Maybe it doesn't it. But I wonder if people spend more focused time on something they've paid for than on something they've clicked on.