This chapter starts off talking all about the Britannica.com web site and how well it competes with Yahoo!, which is an already well established 'portal' web site, one of the major ones attracting millions of page viewers per day. He says that "Britannica.com filled a niche somewhere between Yahoo.com and Discovery Channel Online" (177).
He says that Britannica.com is useful to study for anyone trying to figure out how to make money from a content site, because originally the site was free and the way they were going to obtain money was through those who wished to advertise on their site, but now a user gets a brief summary of articles on their database and has to be a paying customer to view the whole article etc. I personally hate those kind of sites that give you half the reading, but never finish. It's horrible for research papers.
He says that the Harlem Renaissance was a 'spotlight' for them. It was to create interest in Black History, kind of like a feature story in print journalism. One thing I found interesting through his discription of this 'spotlight' was when he said that they subtly tinted each section a different color for variations on the mood. But, he then says there was editing problems with that in that you had to redue pretty much the whole section if you wanted to change simple text, but it acheived its goal, which was to make the era come to life.
He mentions "Hot Spots" map as a clickable menu.
"To connect with a site user, it is important to 'write as if you are talking to an INDIVIDUAL, not a collective group of anonymous Web surfers'" (183).
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hi raquel,
ReplyDeleteinteresting engagement in the chap 12 reading. i see you captured some nuggets of information relative to the the project and expressed how you felt about some of the writer's ideas. good job on your blog posts, overall! i hope that as the semester comes to an end, you'll be able to take away some of the writing principles we discussed in previous chapters and apply them not only in your project for this class but also for future projects way beyond.