As you may have noticed by now, we’ve introduced a little something called ‘page 2’ (look to your right). We added this feature because we felt we needed a way to ‘tier’ the news we publish on OSNews, because a regular (and valid) complaint has been that people felt that interesting, one-of-a-kind items were being drowned out by run-of-the-mill items like software releases, short distribution reviews, and so on. Read on for a little more insight into this one.
We’ve been toying with the idea of tiered news for a while now, because we get a lot of news submissions that we can’t publish due to space constraints, and our own fear of drowning out interesting items to less interesting ones. With page two, we have added the ability to display ten more stories on our website without them flooding the website.
As far as functionality goes, it’s fairly simple. In the OSNews backend we have little drop-down list attached to each story, where we can select either “front page” or “page 2”. Selecting page 2 will put the story in the page 2 box in the sidebar, but for the rest, the item will be exactly like any other item: it has the same layout, and the same commenting, moderating, and recommendation options.
We’re still working on perfecting the feature (for instance, I’m working on converting all our icons to 20x20pix black & white icons (instead of 32×32 colour) so that we can add those to the page 2 box for identification purposes. We’re opting for black and white so that they don’t jump out so much, visually. In case you’re wondering, page 2 is more or less a combination of MacRumors’ “Page 2 rumors” and Ars Technica’s Journal display.
For now, please bear with us as we try to find a proper balance between the front page and page 2 – the feature is new, so we need to adapt a little bit too. We hope this addresses most of the complaints regarding the drowning out of more unique news items.
To me it now looks that the “interesting, one-of-a-kind items” are relegated to the sidebar, displayed in smaller size (and title only), while “run-of-the-mill items” get the prominent placement in the center of the page, with introductory text, bigger icon on the side, etc. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
And am I the only one that is almost blind to the stuff in sidebars? Good thing these stories still show up in rss.
Yes, keep the unique stories on the left, and have the software updates on the right. Otherwise you may as well just add another 10 items to the news display instead.
Why your at it, get rid of the other sidebar stuff and allow people to have the sidebar items display articles for particular categories of news: Google, Mac OS etc.
Edited 2008-11-06 12:39 UTC
Taking the current home page, here’s the personal adjustments I would make as far as categorisation:
Move from Page 1 to Page 2
“Introducing Page Two”
(Reason: Meta)
“ReactOS 0.3.7 Released”
(Reason: Summary contains no feature details)
“Opera CEO: Mini Never Submitted to Apple”
(Reason: Gossip)
“Gruber: Opera Never Submitted Mini to Apple”
(Reason: Gossip)
Move from Page 2 to Page 1
“Benchmarks: Mac OS X 10.5 vs. Ubuntu 8.10”
(Reason: Independent Research)
“Lotus Symphony 1.2, Now with Mac OS X Support” (Maybe)
(Reason: Mac OS X support is a major, notable, feature difference)
Good points (like we can see from your comment score too). Done that way, Page 2 could be a very good idea.
On the other hand, in real life it might often be rather difficult to consider what is minor news only or only a gossip etc. – and thus maybe resulting in yet new row of complaints from some active readers… But everything has its pros and cons.
Personally I see Page 2 as a good way to improve the quality of this site.
Personally, I’ve always just ignored the stories I wasn’t interested in, and read the ones I was. It’s not like we have so many stories flying through here that it’s hard to keep up.
I’ve observed that the complainers about content either just like to complain, or have an agenda. (i.e. suppress news about Ub^H^Ha distro they don’t like.)
To me, “Page 2” seems like an organizational layer devoted to painting the bike-shed.
Edited 2008-11-09 19:39 UTC
Yeah, sadly that seems to be the case all too often, and it gets quite irritating too. But that’s not the whole issue.
Let’s take the Fedora wallpaper news as an example. I was one of the people who asked if the news was worth publishing – but certainly not because I wouldn’t like Fedora (Fedora is one of my favorite Linux distributions), nor because of the joy of complaining for complaining’s sake.
There are many news that may not be worth putting on the front page while maybe still worth publishing.
Putting only major news on front pages works very well for newspapers and magazines, so why wouldn’t it work here on OSnews (or on other news sites in general) too?
Edited 2008-11-09 20:00 UTC
Could we please get one page for all news items as well as a osnews.com/all URL or similar?
Jim
Maybe keep the page 2 stories along with the main stories on the front page, but instead of displaying the teaser – just show the title of the story instead. This way they won’t be stuffed into a sidebox.
I am glad you are working it out. I think its a great alternative, we just need to work out the kinks.
How does this affect RSS? Will there be two separate feeds, plus one combined feed? (I’d prefer the combined feed myself). RSS is how I consume OSNews. I rarely visit the main page.
Agreed. I rarely visit the OSnews home page. The RSS feed is what matters to me. I hope I still get it all through RSS.
The normal RSS feed displays all the news.
Like others, the Page 2 should be more common items: news blurbs or announcements that are little more than links to other stories without much depth in and of themselves. While the left side contains the more beefy items.
That, or simply keep everything to the left and tag the rarer beefy items to show up on Page 2 as well as on the Left. This way, people can see items as they appear and then glance over to see if more important items which may have floated off the Left side since they last visited were tagged.
Of course, this raises an important question: what parameters define a story as worthy of being tagged for notice?
I’m not so sure about the idea for the important/relevent items going on page 1 and one-off blurbs to page 2.
Granted the proposal will make the important articles assessible, but may have a net effect of lowering the readership (and associated discussion) of the “one-offs” by a significant amount.
All said, I think I’m slightly leaning towards supporting the current “new” implementation for longer-lived article on page 2.
Just create and preference to combine Page 1 and Page 2 for anyone who wants to see everything in the front page…
…but besides choices, the “b-sides” thing could be well used… but I would probably put some more details about each news… maybe the first 30-50 words… at least as a tooltip…
I second this. I really don’t think OSNews gets enough articles to warrant a side bar, although some people may like the tiered news (ie: Page2).
I find it annoying to look through headlines on the left and would rather have it all on the main page as it was before.
Maybe as tooltips? But other than that, space on a web site front page page tends to be a rather scarce resource. But you can see the teasers for page 2 news too if you just click on the OSnews Page 2 title.
I wonder if it could be made more clear that the title OSnews Page 2 is really a link to “Page 2”, in other words all those Page 2 news?