CBC.ca has recently redesigned their front page, just about a year after they underwent a major redesign, incorporating a mostly standards-based approach. While there doesn’t seem to be a big change, they’ve made a few small changes to direct their readers’ focus to different areas. For example, three big blocks in a horizontal row (with accompanying images) now direct users to the top stories in news, sports and arts & entertainment. Even more attention is drawn to the big header at the top of the page, that is used to focus users’ attention to the CBC’s traditional media offerings on TV and radio, headlining what major shows will be airing that day. One might wonder why the CBC is attempting to push people back to traditional media when online media is all the rage nowadays.

While I find the new design to be refreshing and more visually attractive, there are some deficits with it.

First, the good

The changes to the front page, as mentioned, haven’t been that big, and while some may think this is lazy, it’s actually a good idea when you have a huge and varied user base. People like familiarity (see the Active User Paradox), and a huge change would likely disrupt them for long enough to see a drop off in readership. By making small incremental changes, you can get a wide and varied user base to accept your new layout slowly over time.

One of the other nice things they added was the weather display at the top of the page, since “weather” was consistently a top search at the CBC.ca site. Rather than force a user to pick their city, the weather panel automatically finds your current city based on a geo-IP address lookup. (This I assume) You can, of course, manually select a city if you want, or if the process can’t find your city. This same process is used to display Local News (if available), but this is at the bottom of the page after most of the stuff on the front page.

Navigating to the News Page, (one of the four new main links - News, Sports, Radio and TV), you’ll find a page that looks curiously like the old CBC.ca front page. If you miss the old front page, you’ll just want to visit this page instead of the new one. Here, a single headline story is emphasized, followed by “Top Stories”, three more headliners, and then a bunch of sections. New to this page is the addition of a tab for “Most Blogged” stories. This feature uses Technorati to find incoming links to CBC.ca stories to find out how popular a particular story is. There’s also a side panel linking to the blogs of CBC journalists, so you can keep up to date with what they’re doing. Kudos to the CBC for acknowledging the importance that blogs play in online news, however, this can obviously be a double-edged sword, as stories like “Hasselhoff gets sole custody of teen daughters” will get top spot. (Who cares? Just because he was a Wendy’s spokesman?)

Lastly, they moved non-news stuff like the “Diversions” and games section down to the bottom, leaving only news-related items near the top of the page. In my opinion this was a good thing, since if you go to a news site, you should be wanting to find news. However, games-related searches currently occupy three of the top 10 searches on the CBC.ca site, so maybe I’m not in agreement with the masses on this one.

The Bad

Strangely, most of the rest of the site hasn’t been updated to the new layout. Individual stories such as this one remain under the old layout, potentially confusing users who generally don’t having to switch back and forth between layouts, especially on the same site. Perhaps they’ll slowly roll-over the stories to the new layout, but keeping two layouts simultaneously definitely is not a good thing. So far, only the major pages such as News, Sports and Radio/TV have been updated to the new layout, as far as I can tell.

The main navigation bar, containing “News”, “Sports”, “Radio” and “TV” as options is also a bit weird. Firstly, it’s location is a bit out of place - it’s slightly offset into the main header of the page, and while this isn’t bad per se, it just doesn’t fit in with the flow of the rest of the site, which doesn’t use this technique. For that reason, it looks tacked on - like a band-aid on the scrape of a child’s knee. The choice of options is also a bit perplexing. Firstly, including TV and Radio, in addition to the main page header being a conduit for TV/Radio listings, one has to wonder if CBC.ca is really committed to online news, or is merely being a cheerleader for their traditional media offerings. And, while “Sports” was an obvious option for a main header, what happened to Business/Finance? It’s apparently been relegated to a small text link hidden somewhere in the front page.

And, while on the news portal page, news is up-front and center, on the main front page, a good portion is taken up by the header pointing you towards TV/Radio. In fact, if you know about the Golden F in usability, you’ll realize that most people will only really look at this part of the page, and won’t see much of the news.

Perhaps this was intended - CBC.ca has to be more than just news, and has to cover all aspects of the broadcasting corporation, with TV and radio being their staple. Sort of like the difference between ABC.com and ABCNews.com. However, the old site didn’t make this distinction, and seemed to work well for most people. Hopefully people will get used to this separation in the future.

The Ugly

Of course, what I say doesn’t matter too much. (Though I like to think that it does) What really matters is what the overall readership base thinks, and CBC knows this, so that’s why they crafted a letter to their audience requesting feedback. In it, Steve Billinger, Executive Director at CBC, says:

We’re listening to you; we know you’re looking for these technological innovations—and it’s our job at CBC to give them to you. The digital media landscape is constantly evolving, with new innovations being developed every day—and Canadians expect us to be ahead of the curve. This is why millions of you come to CBC.ca every day for the latest in news, arts, entertainment and sports.

We’ve already launched our News and Sports portals, with Entertainment and other sites to follow later this summer. Enjoy, and thanks for visiting.

Okay, so maybe we will get more options other than just News/Sports/TV/Radio in the main navigation. But I still don’t get why they’re trying to divert so many people back to TV when they’re talking about the digital media landscape at the same time.

But what do the people think? An informal survey of their comments to the CBC regarding the new design shows that maybe 1/3rd to 1/2 of the people posted negative reviews of the new design. Keep in mind, this was an informal poll - the only people that wanted to say something were part of it. Generally speaking, people with negative opinions tend to voice them louder than those with neutral or good ones.

However, what I think is more important is how the hype and buzz about this movie came about - all of it happened through entirely untraditional channels, and SoaP may be the first movie that was heavily promoted and spread through viral marketing on the Internet, actively encouraged by New Line Cinema. This sets a precendent that other marketers are sure to notice

The viral spread

Viral marketing is nothing new. Basically, the concept of viral marketing is not to advertise by traditional methods, but rather by encouraging people and fans to spread the news of a product by word-of-mouth, to their friends, family and so-forth. This can be done by creating fun little web games that promote a particular product, and thus it is hoped that the game will be forwarded to friends. It’s called “viral” because the hype and buzz spreads from person-to-person, rather than from a particular media campaign (TV, billboard, etc.) directly to the person.

The rise of hugely popular social networks, such as MySpace, has made viral marketing more effective. Witness companies Unilever, using MySpace users to promote Axe deodourant. This method of advertising is extremely cheap compared to traditional methods, and can be very effective. It’s thus a low-risk option that’s just waiting to be exploited by more companies. Perhaps even more astonishing is the rise of companies like PayPerPost, which offers payment to bloggers who agree to write posts about certain products. In a way, these companies are just like regular ad agencies, except they’re operating in a new medium - the online viral market.

These techniques can be related to, or called “astroturfing”. The term itself is a play-on-words of the term “grassroots”, which basically means huge amounts of regular people voicing their support for a particular idea or policy. Astroturf, being fake grass, is thus the same to “grass” as “astroturfing” is to “grassroots” - apparent wide-spread user buzz about a particular product, when in fact the buzz or hype has been ochestrated.

Snakes on a Plane goes viral

The lead up to Snakes on a Plane and its move to viral marketing may have been accidental and unpredicated by the people behind the movie. When someone got wind of the absolutely outrageous title and concept, it apparently quickly spread throughout the web, becoming nothing short of an Internet meme.

This lead to many user-generated videos or art mocking or otherwise speculating on what might happen in the movie. A blog dedicated to it was even launched. And, of course, the many requests of a proper Samuel L. Jackson one-liner eventually lead New Line Cinema to re-open shooting of the movie in early 2006 for the explicit reason of adding this dialogue that users had so rampantly requested. In effect, New Line Cinmea was getting free advertising of their movie because of all the online buzz it was generating because of the outlandish concept. And, perhaps most importantly, they themselves decided to jump on the bandwagon, and further encourage more hype by actually yielding to users’ requests to make the move even more outrageous!

One could argue that the movie wouldn’t have generated so much buzz had it not been so outrageous, but one thing is for sure: There is no way this movie would have generated so much hype before its release if it were not for the web. I guarantee you that almost everyone in the theatre last night had read up on SoaP on the web before going to view it - heck, that’s the only way they would’ve known about it!

I won’t bother to cover the conspiracy theories here, instead sticking to the “official version” because I believe that’s more than enough - I’ve always been interested in the events surrounding September 11th, mainly because the coverage seemed so surreal because the actual events were so astonishing - perhaps the most important geopolitical event of our time, and if not, the most sensational. Here are some other documentaries about the event that you might find interesting.

The first one I saw was the 9/11 Chronology Video, which is a fairly-well done amalgamation of various news videos of that day, put together in a timeline that covers the events from 8:44 AM to about 10:30 AM, approximately in real time. I say “approximately”, because there are some gaps here and there. What’s interesting about this is that the chronology is shown with four separate panes of video, so after you see the second collision in one pane, you wait in anticipation for the President to be notified as he sits in a morning classroom with the kids.

I liked this chronology because it stays faithful to the facts, that is, though it has a commentary, the notes are directly drawn and referenced from the 9/11 Commission Report. It’s also fairly non-partisan, though some would argue it’s hard not to criticize President Bush as you see him sit in the classroom for almost 10 minutes after he is told the country is under attack. I don’t like to judge (I’m not sure how I would have responded so such a grave and high-stress situation), so I can only say this: If it were President Palmer (of the TV series 24), he would have had Jack Bauer on the line within 30 seconds!

But, on a more serious note, the chronology does a good job of conveying the confusion and destruction of that day, though some of the dialogue you here is much more ominous and foreboding; for example, one of the first Fire Chiefs to radio in the report of the first plane crash says something to the effect of, “… we have a number of floors on fire… it looks like the plane was aiming towards the building…”

Another good documentary I found was one that aired on the BBC that dealt with the causes behind the collapse of WTC1 and WTC2. It’s called The Fall of the World Trade Center, and was done by a group called Horizon. (You should be able to find it online) It showed a lot of good 3D animations along with expert opinion to back up the accepted explanations of why the Twin Towers fell - the main reasons being fire proofing that was blown off from the intial impact, leading to exposed metal that weakend from the ensuing fires. It was made back in 2002, so I don’t know why the people who a preaching the “controlled demolition theory” haven’t seen it - it offers a good explanation of the “exploding” or “detonation” sounds that many survivors heard - as the building collapsed, the floors “pancaked” down on top one another, which may explain the chain of loud noises heard.

I’m looking forward to seeing World Trade Center (the movie), sometime soon, despite it seeming like a big Hollywood-esque film. I saw United 93 back a few months ago, and was very moved by it. It was both well done, not-over the top, and at the same time had a lasting impression. I recommend that you see it when it comes on DVD if you haven’t already.

The unique “docu-drama” format tells the story of what would happen if Avian Flu became a pandemic comparable to the Spanish Flu outbreak, and presents this hypothetical outcome as a sort of reality-based TV show that follows the life of an ER nurse and her family, and news soundbites about the ensuing world-wide chaos and the breakdown of society. This is intermingled with short interviews with experts such as researchers in fields like microbiology and virology about their views on what would and what should be done - often in the context of what’s happening in the hypothetical reality. (For example, a historian quips about how he’s sure nations have secretly planned measures for the use of military assets to control civil disorder - while in the contructed scenario, a news anchor reports widespread rioting in major urban centers due to lack of adequate antiviral medicine stocks.)

Alarmist?

I’ll have to admit, when I first saw the ads for this show, I thought it to be overly alarmist. I mean, first of all, the “docu-drama” format doesn’t add to the credibility, in my opinion. I know that the Fifth Estate claims that the scenario is based on facts and the opinions of experts in the field about what could occur, and that extensive research was done - and I believe that. I just think that this scenario is probably the absolute worst-case one. They seemed to point towards the inevitability of a major avian flu pandemic of this scale; that there was no stopping it, and that this would be the eventual outcome. However, ever since flu season has ended, news about avian flu has dwindled, and media has returned to being preoccupied with other matters. In fact, some researchers have discovered why bird flu is not spread so easily from human to human.

Furthermore, the docu-drama format just makes it seem like the Fifth Estate is desperate to produce something sure to capture the public’s attention. Freeing yourself from the bonds of reality is a sure-fire way to make the story more interesting - it’s done all the time. It’s almost like an excuse to make up something sensational. I mean, come on - just cause the pandemic didn’t happen, does that mean you get to pretend that it did, just for the sake of making up fake news about it? That’s almost like being on a diet, and saying “I’ll pass on the pizza if I don’t do a workout”, missing your workout then still having the pizza. I was actually surprised that the Fifth Estate would do something like this, given that they have produced some interesting documentaries before - though others have been somewhat outlandish.

Art imitating life, imitating art

The docu-drama also reminded me of The Stand, which I didn’t read but only saw on TV-movie format, (I think it was on ABC quite a few years ago), and also any general ‘Outbreak’-style movies or shows I may have seen. The warnings of mass-panic, and the ensuing martial law that would be required were nothing short of apocalyptic. Conspiracy-theorists like Alex Jones would have a field day after seeing this docu-drama.

But, in a way, I hope it provokes action on the part of world authorities to prepare for such a disaster. I understand that avian flu isn’t the only thing they have to worry about, but in terms of public perception, it may be. Hopefully, when/if avian flu starts spreading from human to human, things won’t be as bad as portrayed.