For as long as editors have had newspapers to fill, there have been news stories that aren’t really news stories, and stories that get more attention than they deserve because of the editorial slant of the newspaper. Most people will have noticed a leading story in a newspaper about a nearby tragedy where one or two lives were lost which, when juxtaposed with a smaller article further back in the paper of hundreds of people being killed on the other side of the world, paints an ugly picture of the priorities of the editorial team and by extension, the readers. (The website mailwatch.co.uk collects and comments on some of the more notorious British tabloid front page headlines.)

The art of writing online headlines is slightly different to print, because you tend to be writing for a completely different audience. In print, you need to stand out more than the other newspapers in the newsagent and be the one that your target audience reaches for and buys- because that’s where the money is. Online, you don’t need to attract the attention of potential readers- you need to attract the attention of search engines, so that you’re higher up the search list when someone’s looking for a story about your subject. (more…)

April 24th, 2007 | Other Media, Web Content | No comments

Back in the early days of the World Wide Web were the “Browser Wars.” The Web was just taking off, and the vast majority of the browser market used the Netscape Navigator browser. One of Netscape’s goals was to “level the playing field” among operating systems- in line with the ideals behind the World Wide Web project, to create a browser platform that was consistent across operating systems. Microsoft saw this as a threat, and released Internet Explorer as competition.I don’t want to go into the details of the browser wars themselves- suffice to say that Netscape went out of business and subsequently Microsoft stopped developing Internet Explorer for about 7 years- but one consequence was that for some time, the browser market was split between Netscape and Microsoft. (more…)

April 18th, 2007 | Browsers, WWW | 1 comment