A closer look at Spiegel Online's time machine

Some time ago, Spiegel Online, Germany's leading news website, launched its ambitious portal on contemporary history, einestages.de. The idea was welcomed everywhere, although the navigation was considered to be too complicated. The masses of photos are difficult to access (why isn't there a real slide show functionality?), and beside (sometimes too) sophisticated texts, I miss some short catchy statements.

The latest innovation on einestages.de is the „einestage.de-Zeitmaschine“. This time machine application shows how historic content can be accessed visually: Imagine you rush in a space shuttle through the universe: the years fly by, and masses of photos that stand for contemporary events pass your way. Technically, the flash solutions works quite well – in case you have a fast computer and the latest flash version. Of course you can set your starting time – either you start the flight nowadays or 100 years ago. The speed can be controlled by the track wheel.

So far so good. This time machine seems to be a smart idea to arrange historic content via expressive photos, giving inspiration to events you haven't known so far, satisfying a certain play instinct.

It really sounds perfect at first thought, but obviously it is not so easy to handle. To be improved: the link between the photos flying by and the real content: If you find a photo of interest, you can only click on it. A new site opens that shows the photo and provides some basic information such as location, date and relevant tags. But: neither title nor explanation what it's about. To access a short description, you have to click once more. But by getting into details, e.g. clicking through the slide show or reading the related article on einestages.de you leave the time machine. So if you want to continue your flight, you have to restart the application. You can't go on the point where you had left the time machine.

In brief: the time machine is a fascinating idea which picks up a human dream. The application is visually attractive, playful and full of inspiring content. But: Once more we get aware of a central challenge of visual journalism: to provide a close link from the attention-catching photo and the real content. One photo may not always suffice to immerse users into meaningful contemporary events.

For me, however, flying through the times with the einestages.de time machine would be even greater if some brief content snippets would be provided just one click away. Of course, everyone wants to maximize page impressions. But in this case, I fear the einestages.de time machine would be reduced to a playful gimmick and not to an inspiring way to discover contemporary history.

Volkswagen has two unpleasant messages for publishers

The second day of the FIPP/VDZ publisher conference in Berlin started with a shock. Ralf Maltzen, director of internet marketing at Volkswagen, had two unpleasant messages for his media partners:

1. Volkswagen will start to shift ad budgets at least on the web more and more to performance based models. Only if portals contribute to a sufficient number of measured test drive requirements or direct consumer feedbacks they get fully paid.

2. Volkswagen will increase direct publishing activities on the web."On the digital kiosk our volkswagen portal is just one click away from the auto magazines." Maltzen showed his highly praised and much awarded Schlemmer blog campaign with German comedia Hape Kerkeling (now offline unfortunately). He made clear, that Volkswagen might no longer be dependent on the media to tell it's stories on the web.

I tried to imagine what Maltzen would argue if the publishers would counter his shift to performance based ad deals by emphasizing the impact of editorial coverage to automobil sales. Who brought the pictures of yesterday's VW Scirocco debut at the Geneva auto fair to the world public? Who is providing test drive reports to advise consumers in order to enable purchasing decisions. And Volkswagen get's it all for free. What about making the editorial contribution part of the overall discussion about performances and fair ad deals?

The „v-word“ – German broadcasters and publishers in heated dispute

Whenever German media managers meet these days the „v-word“ is one of the hottest topics. The two day magazine publisher congress „Powering digital success“ that started today in Berlin is no exception.

Since Video has started to become a standard on average news sites the publishers of newspapers, print magazines and the tv broadcasters realise that the web is becoming the central battlefield for media competition in the coming years. Let’s assume that in five years from now young users browsing the web won’t be able to distinguish information portals operated by print brands, broadcasters or web only providers. They will basically all provide news in text, pictures and video. And I’m sure that the visual formats, mainly video, will be crucial for success in the mass market and for attracting ad revenues.

The consequences are quite irritating. Suddenly for instance German public tv, financed by monthly fees of German taxpayers, and the regional newspapers find themselves competing for the same audience on the same platform. Conflicts are inevitable.

The publishers accuse the broadcasters to pump up their portals with tons of premium content produced with public money. They fear that users won't click on privately financed news sites any more if they can find it all at the broadcasters' portals (and completely free of annoying ads).

The broadcasters and the regional broadcasting licensing authorities meanwhile try to prevent newspapers from publishing online video. The tv channels are afraid that every click on a web video clip will contribute to a decline of tv usage. Thus they argue, that every video clip on a newspaper site is a tiny piece of tv coverage and requires a broadcasting licence.

In the latest move public TV now offered the publishers to team up and use their branded news video. While German publisher legend Hubert Burda rejected the offer as some sort of poison pill, the WAZ newspaper group announced to co-operate with WDR television, the largest regional member of the public ARD group.

Be sure there is more news to come...

Short review on the latest german website relaunches

Maybe you remember the large blogosphere among media blogs about the latest website relaunches, such as Holtzbrincks' youngster news site Zoomer.de, News-TV N24.de or the yellow press website Bild.de.

Despite we note that there is much difference between these sites, one attribute is common: the shift to a visual presentation of news.

N24 focuses on video which seems very logic for a news tv channel (but which has been a novum anyway). Bild and Zoomer use appealing flash effects to present their slide shows and video news, or newsmaps to enhance the selection of regional news.

But both Bild and Zoomer not only use visual features. They establish also a 'visual layout': The top news section on the first screen is dominated by large photos, teaser texts are skipped. Scrolling down, we find a more conventional design, nevertheless focused on big images and photo slide shows.

Compared to this visual oriented website design, relauches such as netzeitung or FAZ.net seem rather conventional. We are looking forward to further relaunch projects to find out if there is a news site design concept which is different from the spiegel-sueddeutsche-focus-faz-netzeitung-scheme.

Best of Visual: visuwords

New media deserve new formats, even when the content itself does not change. Well understood by the makers of Visuwords, an online graphical dictionary. It is like a dictionary, but different. It shows in beautiful graphs in which ways words are related, which different meanings a word might have and so on (try “work” or “great”).

A small legend makes it easy to use, at least a lot, lot, lot more easy than with the traditional dictionaries, which are difficult to decipher.