[access-uk] Making the web legible: Take it off | The Economist

From: Gordon Keen <gordonkeen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2011 10:12:40 +0000

Hi
As a demonstration, this article is the result of using the *read* plug in to
safari which uses the readability code, what do you think?

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/02/making_web_legible?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+tidbits_main+%28TidBITS%3A+Mac+News+for+the+Rest+of+Us%29

Making the web legible: Take it off | The Economist

I printed the New Yorker article about Paul Haggis and Scientology and now
there aren't any trees left in the world. Sorry, everybody. (@johnmoe)

@johnmoe I saw how long the New Yorker's Paul Haggis article was and
@instapaper'd it to my Kindle. No trees and fewer watts needed. (@kawika)

CONTENT sites (other than this newspaper's, of course) often appear to view
readers' attention as a commodity to be diced up, then bartered or sold. Part
is flogged to advertisers. Part is handed off to editors who try to ensure
visitors stick around the site for a bit—like flies in honey—rather than
buzzing off elsewhere. Part is given up to navigational gubbins meant to make
the site stickier still. Only a small portion is devoted to the reason people
come to a website in the first place: the unique article, blog post, or other
entry found there.

Two years ago Arc90, a technology-strategy firm, created Readability. This free
piece of software let readers reclaim 100% of their attention by stripping
cluttered websites of all the superfluous bells and whistles. It began life as
a bit of browser code encapsulated into a bookmarklet, a self-contained
mini-program you plop into a browser's bookmark toolbar or in a bookmark menu.
Tap Readability on a page with a block of continuous words and, lo and behold,
everything but the text disappears. The software rewrites the text in
reasonably-sized black type, and unfurls it over a white background that
resembles a book page.

The firm then released Readability's underlying code under a broad free
license. Apple picked it up for a reading-mode feature in its Safari browser,
and it was built into plugins for other browsers. Soon it became a common noun,
at least in some milieus. Readability was inspired by Instapaper, a service
developed by Marco Arment, a former head programmer at Tumblr. Mr Arment also
had based his free service on a bookmarklet. Click Read Later, and a
stripped-down version of a page is stored in your account on his server, along
with a link back to the original page.

Readability has since metamorphosed into a standalone company of the same name.
It is now a fee-based web service with many elements in common with Instapaper,
including archiving stories in your account, but aimed at providing a cash
stream from readers to publishers. An Apple iOS app is around the corner. As a
result, Readability competes with donation-based payment systems aimed at
publishers like Flattr, Kachingle or Sprinklepenny. Like these, Readability
collects a few dollars each month from every subscriber (though higher
contribution are possible) and distributes about 70% of the revenue to
participating publishers (its competitors distribute 80% to 90%).

But it differs in important ways, too. First and foremost, the other three
pitch themselves to users along the lines of public radio and television,
aiming to cast publishers—whether humble bloggers or media conglomerates—in the
role of put-upon content providers pleading for spare change. On the face of
it, then, they are looking to ride on readers' guilt or selflessness.

Richard Ziade, Readability's boss, prefers to rely on his customers' simple,
unadulterated self-interest: I want to read this now, or I want to read this
later, but I want to read it without all the irritating frippery. In this
respect, Readability is more akin to crowdfunding operations, where a bonus is
offered to entice a small-time donor to become a fully fledged patron. These
extras range from a dinner with the creator of whatever it is that is being
crowdfunded (often artistic projects) to what is, in effect, an exclusive
advance pre-purchase. In Readability's case, the bonus is its core archiving
and text-conversion function.

Another difference is that unlike Flattr or Kachingle (but not Sprinklepenny),
Readability does not require a content site to put a badge on every page for
readers to click on in order to indicate that a micropayment has been made. Any
such badge or widget means introducing new code in the website's innards. It
also means readers cannot donate to unaffiliated websites.

Although Readability does offer publishers the option of including "Read Now"
and "Read Later" widgets on their content pages, which lets users dispense with
a bookmarklet or a browser plug-in, it does not require that they do. Instead,
the software tracks the pages it converts and archives, promising to hold the
fees for all sites visited by its subscribers in the form of self-administered
escrow. Any site that decides to adopt the widget will receive its share of
fees collected from the service's inception.

However, the firm faces the same problems as any micropayment system. It must
reach a critical mass of subscribers to make the revenue drip appealing to the
biggest publishers who will then, hopefully, reel in more subscribers. The rub
is that big publishers' sites typically brim with precisely the sort of
unwanted clutter Readability targets. Removing it may annoy such clutter's main
purveyors, ie, advertisers, who also frequently happen to be such sites'
principal sources of revenue. True, for Readability to work its pruning magic,
a page must load in full first; only once a visitor has beheld it in all its
glory may he choose to pare it down. But that decision can be made rapidly—that
is, after all, the whole point. Giving readers full command of their attention
implies having to wrest some of it from the ad men. In this regard, at least,
surfing the web remains a zero-sum game.

[access-uk] Making the web legible: Take it off | The Economist

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