Advanced Tests
for Wireless Tools
by Rob Runett
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| Intel’s Web tablet prototype provides “always-on” access. |
Soon newspapers will be designing content for hoards of sexy, handheld Internet appliances. Only one minor question remains—just what will those appliances look like?
The interface of the future may well be the Web tablet, a handheld device developed by Intel. Based on an experiment conducted with Newhouse-owned Advance Internet, the tablet solves concerns about content presentation, convenience—and, most importantly, newspapers’ involvement in the next generation of publishing platforms.
Intel executives asked themselves a tough question about three years ago—why families weren’t using home computers more often. Based on a technique called ethnography, Intel’s research indicated that families gather most often in their kitchens and family rooms. After analyzing the findings, the company set out to create a device suited to family gathering spots, with a usage model different than that of a typical PC.
“People use a handheld appliance many times throughout the day, but in short bursts,” said David Preston, new-business director at Intel Architecture Labs in Hillsboro, Ore., during his presentation at an NAA-sponsored wireless summit.
Intel’s first prototype was a machine attached to a refrigerator. Further experimentation yielded a tablet connected to a PC not by wires, but radio waves. Engineers in the company’s Oregon lab built a prototype larger than a Palm Pilot, but smaller than a weekly newsmagazine. Intel then teamed with Advance Internet to test the theory
that by making the Internet instantly accessible, portable, easy to use and personal, more consumers will go online more often.
From Advance’s standpoint, preparing content for consumers in their kitchens or living rooms requires more than a straight dump of the morning’s paper, according to Executive Producer Joe Territo. Advance added a thin layer of customized content to Oregon Live, the Web partner of the Portland test market’s local paper, The Oregonian. Each member of the 10 participating families received a personal icon leading them to a unique opening page. If a participant indicated a preference for sports, they received sports news from The Oregonian and The Associated Press. Cooking enthusiasts found articles from Conde-Net, another Advance site.
Offering relevant material drove the content side of the project, and Advance Internet made some assumptions about participants’ news habits. “We assumed people wanted the top news of the day,” Territo said. The company hired a stringer to file local stories five days per week.
Compared to their regular PC use, test families interacted with the tablet more frequently throughout the day, and the vast majority found Advance’s content satisfying.
The downside? The computer and Internet connection must be on at all times to afford instant access. For advertising, the biggest perceived advantage plays to a marketer’s core goal: brand placement directly in front of the consumer at the time of purchase.
Intel’s decision to reach out to Advance Internet delivered a message that newspaper publishers—harangued for their slow adoption of new technologies—may have a place on the wireless frontier after all.
Runett is NAA’s manager of new media analysis. E-mail, runer@naa.org. To order NAA’s white paper, Newspapers Everywhere—A Menu for the Mobile Millennium, call (800) 651-4NAA and ask for item 50205.
For Online Ads,
a Home-Grown Perl
by Christopher J. Feola
Ah, those smells of the back shop, those memories—the hot lead, the cold type, the sizzling Perl...
What was that last one again?
Perl is sort of the copy desk of the Internet world—something utterly unknown to outsiders, yet responsible for much of the work. More precisely, Perl is a programming language that has been pressed into service driving the World Wide Web.
Out in Oregon, for instance, David Merrill has used it to build a banner-advertising system for the state press association. “We have been gearing up to sell banners for Northwest newspaper sites,” says the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association computer specialist. “The ability to provide site-usage data to advertisers improves our ability to market that service.”
But systems that handle online advertising and metrics are fairly expensive. So Merrill...well, let him tell the story.
“The script is an adaptation of an existing Perl application, which I downloaded for $49 from www.cgitoolbox.com. That application, called The Ultimate Ad Tracker, provided the basic data-collection and display engine that I was looking for.” (Other would-be Perl jockeys can download a demo from the cgitoolbox site.)
Merrill then “altered the access quite heavily to allow the kind of administration and online-advertiser access that we needed, and added the link-code-generation facility,” he says.
Merrill’s creation is used to serve online ads to ONPA member sites and provide usage statistics to advertisers. Sites link to the ads, and the link code addresses the tracking script directly to record the access. A separate script displays usage data in numeric and graphical form. Advertisers view this display by entering a unique account ID in an online form. Each ad has two tracking accounts, one for “hits” and one for click-throughs, and the displays are viewed separately.
Here’s the geek bit: The scripts are written in Perl 5 for Linux running Apache Web-server software—a setup that’s as close as you get to a standard on the Web.
As you might expect, this is not Merrill’s first trip down programming lane. He’s written a Perl script that drives online conference-registration forms, computes fees and accepts payment, plus a database-driven advertising-cost calculator (see www.nwnn.com). He’s also developing a browser-based intranet/Internet database-management system for maintaining ONPA’s membership database, currently available only on static HTML pages that are a bear to maintain. On the back burner is an online “clipping service” that would search Oregon newspaper sites and e-mail subscribers URLs containing matches to their search criteria.
A fairly busy guy. And while this may sound like a lot of arcane stuff, it’s a lot like all the arcane stuff going on at your copy desk—vitally important to your operation.
Feola is chief of technology for Belo Interactive. E-mail, cfeola@belo.com.