Web browsing
Browsing titles in a library or bookstore offers a different sort of pleasure than the quick find in Google. One of the first format features in HTML for the web browser was the bulleted list, an easily browsable presentation of content. Especially useful when sorted and harvested over a period of time, compiled lists can display trends and issues not readily discernible in a returned search hit list.LRB Library's iClips not only daily gathers and lists news stories from online news providers, but compiles weekly selections of the local articles from Hawaii press for each month. Selecting the option to view the weekly compendium, one can browse a month's stories for each category.
During January and February, iClips harvested over 200 stories on the Hawaii State Legislature 2007 Session; and, proving the saying that everyone has an opinion, the largest weekly compendium of articles is, by far, the Editorials: February alone with over 300 listings.
posted by stephen at 12:59 AM
2 Comments:
It is nice to use bullets to arrange topics as long as they are few (less than 10). However, in the iClips case they are more than 100. For this case, you need to add search box from a search provider to help reader to get your content.
Nice post!
You're right about limited use of bullets. In this case our target user is a browsing researcher, much like someone walking through the stacks of a library, not necessarily searching for a specific item as much as perusing pre-sorted lists for harvesting, research and evaluating news reporting trends.
To cut down on list item clutter, simple categories on the general iClips page and weekly sortings for the category compendium pages are used to visually relieve the overall list. Also, because these are links to off-site articles, any search we added would only search keyword occurrence in linked title of article, not in the text of the article itself.
Not elegant, I admit, but we hope of some quotidian value (not archival).
Thanks very much for the input.
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