Tomorrow’s News

By Ian, on December 6th, 2006

The redesign of the Danish version of IDG’s ComputerWorld website has more than a passing resemblance to a blog.

Here’s the US site:

And here’s the new Danish version:

As Ernst Poulsen points out, in the new design stories are simply ordered chronologically like a blog; each is presented in the same style, no matter what their relative importance, like a blog; they are all tagged, like a blog; there’s minimal navigation and any user can contribute, like err… a social network.

True, this isn’t a million miles away from the appearance of the front page of The Register (est’d 1994), though its stance on user-generated stuff seems to indicate that it’s unlikely that readers will be writing on the homepage any time soon. Perhaps more adventurously, ZDNet.co.uk has recently relaunched with user communities and blogs, some of which are on the front page, albeit beneath the fold.

Poulsen is concerned that computerworld.dk is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Traditional news website design aids communication by drawing attention to the most important stories. Giving every story the same weighting and sorting them by time-stamp won’t help a busy reader with two minutes to spare digest the day’s key stories very well.

I think I agree. However, the old model of users’ interaction with an online publication relegated to a forum on a distant page, far away from the journalists’ stories, has clearly had its day. The half-way house between traditional editorial models and social media mayhem offered by ZDNet.co.uk doesn’t fall between stools, as you might expect, but combines some of the benefits of both approaches. It remains to be seen, of course, whether the enterprise IT types that the site aims at will embrace the read/write web.

[disclosure: my wife works for ZDNet UK]

Update: Very interesting riposte on the Poynter website to Ernst Poulsen by Claus Solvsteen, who worked on the Danish design. He says the design allows for quick scanning and that other display options will be made available in the future.