E-Media Tidbits

informationweek.com Here's where Cory Doctorow's article is supposed to be.

UPDATE: Since the original Nov. 30 publication of this post, I've since learned that the premise of this story is in error. In fact, Information Week's system is displaying the story correctly. The error was mine; I was mistakenly using a truncated URL linked to from other sites, which did not work. My sincere apologies to Info Week. Here is a working link to Cory Doctorow's post.

That said, there's still a useful lesson here: How does your site handle access errors, such as truncated URLs? In this case, I received a page that looked like the ad system was interfering with the content; no error message.

For the record, here is the text of my original post...

On Nov. 26, Information Week published a thoughtful column by noted author and blogger Cory Doctorow: How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook. Follow that link now. I dare you.

I disagree with Doctorow's conclusions, but that's not my point here. My point is that when I try to follow that link to Info Week's main page for that story, I don't see any content on that page. I might expect that from my main browser, Firefox, where I use the AdBlock Plus plug-in -- but I got the same problem in my Safari browser, in which I do not block ads (see picture).

That's why, when I included this article in the Nov. 28 "daily links" post on my personal blog Contentious.com, I linked to the printer-friendly version of Doctorow's column, which was forwarded to me by a colleague. Normally I link to the publishing venue's main page for the article, especially if the site is ad-supported. But here I had no choice. (Info Week does offer some advertising on its printer-friendly pages, but I'll bet that's not nearly as lucrative for them.)

I figured perhaps this was just a Mac-specific glitch. Or a glitch on that one site, or story. But then yesterday, media blogger Seamus McCauley posted that he'd experienced the same problem with Doctorow's story. "I gamely waded through a couple of interstitial ads, waited patiently for the ad-tracking, Intellitext, ad-serving, AdWords and the ten banners (of various sizes) that grace the page to load, and then discovered that the one thing not included on this page was the content of the article. Refresh? Same."

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Also, McCauley pointed to this Nov. 26 Lost Remote post about a similar (but not identical) problem observed on the Hollywood Reporter site. (Note: I just viewed the Hollywood Reporter story page noted by Lost Remote and I don't see that problem -- so either it's been fixed or there's some difference in my system that prevents the problem and allows that article content to display in my browser.)

I don't know exactly what the problem with displaying content is here, but one thing seems possible: the ad format or delivery system may be interfering with the display of content. That may just be a technical glitch -- but it can create the appearance, as McCauley noted, that "there's some fascinating prioritization going on in some places right now."

If your news venue employs large online ad formats (interstitials, huge Flash-animated banners, etc.), have you been checking for such content display problems on multiple browsers and platforms? If not, you might want to. No matter how much money you're getting for those big ads, it's not worth it if they make people think your site is broken.