Bill Gates believes newspapers will be all online in just five years, citing the only obstacle preventing that is the clumsiness of devices to read stories. Note this is ‘all online’, meaning that there will be no off-line presence. Last Thursday night, the editor of the Daily Telegraph spoke about the challenges of the digital age, reckoning that the press only has itself to blame for falling sales. Apparently he encountered resistance in turning the Telegraph into a multimedia operation.

Both of these views miss two crucial points: there is nothing stopping newspapers being solely online now, because there is no need to invent devices to read stories. They exist already: the PC and the PDA-enabled mobile phone are both perfectly adequate tools to deliver newspaper content. What needs to happen is for newspapers to rethink their content for the web. Rendering a newspaper as clickable PDFs, or within custom developed readers are wrong approaches because neither delivers content in the most accessible and usable format. Even the (relatively) recent relaunches of The New York Times and The Times fail to achieve this.

Interestingly, there is a format already in use that millions of web content providers already use. For online browsing, there’s the typical blog format, and if you want content to be selected, filtered and delivered in its most succinct form, newspapers can use RSS feeds. Most blog engines provide categories, tagging and searches. Combine this with intelligent RSS generators and you can deliver targeted content directly to people. Furthermore, using a tagging tool such as del.icio.us allows people to build up their own library of content for future reference. This is incredibly powerful stuff.

The drive for newspapers to become multimedia organisations is misguided. What they need to do is exploit their niche: they haven’t historically delivered rolling 24 hour news, so they shouldn’t concentrate on this. They’re not television or YouTube either. Instead they should concentrate on the analysis of news and its impact locally, nationally and worldwide. Publishing on a daily basis has given newspapers the opportunity to reflect on the news, which ironically is what many blogs now do. If they feel the need to provide rolling news then they can do this, and follow-up with analysis on selected items. After all, if Reuters can deliver raw news feeds in RSS, why go elsewhere?

There are two other aspects of old media that need to be addressed: artwork and advertising. Photographs and illustrations are considered crucial to news stories because they often provide context or additional information that words cannot adequately convey. Neither should be insurmountable hurdles. Many bloggers embed additional media into their articles, and RSS readers are increasingly able to render embedded content. Problems arise when trying to replicate spreads and similar artistic representations. But this isn’t really an issue: concentrating on delivering the news should be the main aim.

Aside: The birth of the CD led to many people mourning the loss of LP sleeve art. This was re-born as more elaborate CD packaging. The same concern is now being raised with digital downloads. Some record labels are providing digital booklets with downloads, or per-track artwork for iTunes and iPods. What’s missing are links to authorised web pages that provide all of the information that used to be given on LPs. Take a look at hereinmyhead for an idea of what’s possible.

Many publishers use advertising as a way of obtaining income for their work. Strangely, for newspapers and magazines, the subscriber also pays. A division arises in online content. Often non-subscribers are fed advertisements and subscribers get their content ad-free. Advertising online is a divisive issue, and many people are antagonised at the increasingly obtrusive delivery of advertisements. This distinction between free and paid-for content will, I think, remain, and advertising delivery will become more targeted towards a specific readers’ interest. Google’s purchase of Feedburner is a clue as to what’s about to happen.

When the iPhone is available in the UK, I’ll be buying one. I’ll also be cancelling my physical newspaper subscription, saving myself £25 a month which can go towards my iPhone call package.

Here’s something interesting from another website:

.. a client login form where both the username and password fields are disabled, along with the Submit button. This isn’t a javascript issue – they’re hard coded as disabled.

If a section of a website isn’t available, there are at least two better things to do:

• don’t make that section public, or,
• tell visitors that the section isn’t available.

Choosing an Expiry Date for credit card drop down menus is a tricky business. Here’s why:

You could just pick a date in the future, say 2020, but then you might have to change the code or configuration data when credit cards start to be issued with end dates beyond 2020. This is obviously problematic because you need to know when this happens, or wait for your first customer complaint.

A better solution is to choose a year a specific number of years ahead from today’s date. All you need to know is the longest period of validity that a credit card has.

The Start Date is similarly tricky, but if you know the typical period of validity, then you can work back from today’s date to come up with a suitable year.

The trouble with this solution is that it requires thought and discussion with credit card companies, or an examination of past credit card records. This appears to be something that British Gas haven’t done on their house.co.uk website.

Instead the Expiry Date drop down has years that run up to 2999:

And they start from 1900.