All this talk of news sites and product design and user experience… it got me thinking: Wouldn’t it be fun to have a sandbox to play in? Wouldn’t it be pleasant to try out some ideas?
This summer, in the depths of my obsession, I had a few conversations with Adam Bachman and Jesse Kriss. I posed the observation: “Okay, I really care about this stuff. If I wanted to put some money where my mouth is, could I actually make a constructive contribution?”
After a few cups of coffee, a few paper sketches, and a whole lotta talkin’, one of the fun ideas someone suggested was: Why not just, you know …do it.
Just create a news product. A minimally viable news product, to be sure. Not a proper, full-grown news product. Yet, nonetheless, something with a minimal semblance of reality, built under real life entrepreneurial pressures.
Is that crazy? How might one build a news entity from scratch? What if you had to create the whole thing, from start to finish, in a single weekend?
One couldn’t get too ambitious, certainly. You’d need something extraordinarily simple, with simple demands on your time and money. But it would also need to be, in some sense, real. A thing that someone, somewhere, might actually, you know, dig.
That’s the fun of a minimally viable product, right? It can be useless to almost everyone, and therefore make no money, but if it costs you almost nothing to build, and almost nothing to tend, then, well, if it’s cool to just a tiny number of people, it could be the seed of something bigger and better. Right?
Here’s the Idea
The simplest news site we could think of that might still be worthwhile is something along the lines of Boston.com’s The Big Picture. It’s simple, it’s beautiful, and it’s compelling.
Maybe Baltimoreans would like to see our own city in pictures like that. The daily pictures of our life in this city — maybe that’s a compelling thing. Maybe I’d like to sit with my iPad in the morning and flick through a page of big, beautiful, Baltimore images. Snapshots of my neighbors. Not some ice sculpture contest in Sweden, but the new graffiti by that amazing street artist who works up and down Greenmount Avenue, or the kids that were hula-hooping at HampdenFest, or the view from the stands at the latest Raven’s game.
Okay, so we have an idea.
Here’s the Implementation
In the spirit of building a “real” thing in a weekend, there had to be a comprehensive plan. It wouldn’t do to say “okay, design an ideal site, then hire some photographers, then….” No! Too much time! Too many resources!
Instead, we’ve got to find some pieces that already exist, and figure out what we can do in one weekend that would bring additional value.
Friday Night
Now, the reason I got on a kick this weekend is because Friday night was the night I stumbled across the new WordPress template by Information Architects.
I had already admired iA. They build news sites. They build really good news sites. And they do it based on principles in which I believe. Go ahead and check out their site. You’ll notice right away that it’s clean and easy to read. What you might not notice right away is that it’s been designed with much more care than first meets the eye. Not sure what I mean? Try resizing the window. You’ll find that this site has been designed five full times, to create the perfect layout for whatever screen size or device you might be using to read it. The same page will magically pop into a new layout as you resize your window. It’s really lovely. It’s really carefully done. And it’s really up for sale.
For, at the present time of writing, a measly 55 buckaroos.
Gentlepersons, we have ignition.
Saturday Morning
What’s a source of photography? I could pay someone, but I need something immediately. Well, there are a lot of photos on the web. Flickr has a bunch. They even have a bunch licensed into the Creative Commons — that lovely place where creative impulses go to live instead of die.
Let’s start with Flickr.
Now we’ve got a site template, and we’ve got a source of photography. Are we done? No. Why? Because the long term cost is still high. I could search Flickr every day, laboriously copying and pasting content from each page into my site. But the time it takes to do that would add up, fast, and the whole point of this is to try an experiment that doesn’t suck me dry while I figure out if it’s got any potential. I want good photos, but I don’t want to spend 30 minutes every morning collecting them.
The Tool
My answer to this problem was to make a tool. I spent Saturday building it, and I call it Seymour. Say hi to Seymour!
What does Seymour do? Well, it automates the curation of images for my site.
When you launch it, it looks like this:
And what is it doing? Well, it’s loading up a search page of all Flickr photos uploaded in the last two weeks that include the word “Baltimore” and are licensed under an appropriate Creative Commons license.
That’s the default starting point. Then, I can start browsing. I can do so by clicking around, or by entering more specific (or less specific) search terms.
Maybe I want to create a collection of photos about the ships down in the harbor. I can enter the search terms up top and refine my search. So far this isn’t anything more fancy than a normal web browser, right?
But the helpful bit comes next: I click on a photo I like, and it looks like this:
Down at the bottom, you’ll find that Seymour has automatically pulled out all the information I need. Title, description, and author information so I can give proper credit to the photographer.
I click on that arrow button there, and Seymour files away this information until I’m ready to publish.
I do this a few more times. Click, browse, click, browse, “Ooo, that one’s cool, let’s use that one”, click, filed, click, filed, done.
Then I click the “Post Them!” button, and friendly old Seymour goes out to my WordPress site, talks to it in the language it understands (XMLRPC), and creates a new post with the photos I liked.
And that’s it! Takes a few seconds.
It didn’t take the entirety of Saturday to make, but I did have to figure out a lot of new Cocoa technology I’ve never used before, so it did become the day’s project. It was a lot of fun just learning new stuff.
Sunday Morning
Well, now that I’m this far, I might as well try to make the site look decent, right? It starts out looking just like the Information Architect’s site, because it IS their site. I don’t want or need to change it much, but it should have its own look.
I’m not a professional web designer, but I can poke around in a site without bringing it to utter ruin, and I did my best to customize this one. Well, the best I could do in a day.
And thus was born
SeeMoreB.com
A place to see large, lovely photos from in and around Baltimore.
Fun! (Well, fun for me at least!)
What happens next
To be honest, I’m not really sure. It’s the sort of thing I could actually keep updating for a few months and see what happens. That was, after all, the whole point of creating Seymour. The tool makes it easy. If nothing ever came of it, I’d be down 55 bucks for the template, 10 bucks for the domain name, and a weekend worth of work. Plus, of course, whatever little amount of time I’d spend actually clicking on photos I liked.
Would there be a reason to do that? I don’t honestly know. I certainly like having the site as a sandbox. If I tried to make it more than a sandbox, would it have a path to something more mature? I think it’s possible. If it did develop some kind of audience, a tasteful ad in the right spot might actually generate a dollar or two. Or maybe it wouldn’t. It’d be an interesting experiment either way.
Anyway, like I said, I honestly don’t know what happens next. If nothing else, or perhaps above all else, I’m open to suggestions.
P.S.: Thanks to luckydave for finding the picture of Seymour.
