The Economist Mobile

Being a loyal reader of this blog should have some benefits. With that thought in mind, it is my pleasure to invite you to preview the beta release of our mobile product.

Please point your mobile browsers to: mobile.economist.com.

The current release includes:

Daily news and views

Selections from the current issue of The Economist:

• Politics this week
• Business this week
• KAL's cartoon
• Leaders
  
• Business
• Science and technology

Plus Gulliver on business travel

"Daily news and views" and "Gulliver" will be updated throughout the day.

Your opinion is important to us. We ask that if you try out the service that you share your impressions with us directly from your handset via the feedback link at the bottom of each page.

We encourage you to tell us and each other what you think about the service right here on the blog. Tell us what applications or content would be valuable for you to have. It would also be helpful to identify the handset device you use (in your comments) so we can better understand how we might customize solutions.

Reading text on the home page

We recently launched a set of changes to the typography on the home-page, in an attempt to make this page easier to read. While the change is not dramatic, it is one of a number of small changes that we continue to make all over the site. The choice to do this was based on responses we received from readers who submitted feedback, telling us that the text on the home-page has been hard to read.

For those of you who may be interested in the technical details, here are a few:

• The article links are bolder, in order to make them stand out more from the surrounding text.
• In the blogs area of the page we added a link to each blog (not just to the latest article in that blog).
• In the 'Most commented' area the linked portion of the text is limited to the article title, in order to make that part stand out -- long stacks of links on multiple lines can be hard to read.
• We worked on finding a better fit in the smaller areas.

We are not able to respond individually to most of the feedback that we get through the site feedback link (on the top right of every page on the site). But we do welcome this feedback and find it useful, so please do continue to submit feedback this way, as you read or use the site.

Is the home-page easier to read after this recent change, or not? And have you ever noticed or submitted feedback through that site feedback link?

Fall preview

We are planning our fall product release schedule and I wanted to give our "Behind the curtain" readers an early rundown of what is coming. We hope where possible to be able to get some early user feedback from you.

The Global Electoral College: Early next week we will be launching a voting simulation application that will allow all of our registered users to "mark their ballots" in the US presidential election. Using the US electoral college methodology votes will be tallied and assigned with "winner take all" results for each and every country. While we expect the balloting to be fun, we will also be encouraging a serious discussion on the election. As they say in Chicago, vote early and often!

Mobile Edition: A relaunch of our mobile edition as a free (currently requires a subscription) ad supported product. It will include our Daily News Analysis features, selections from the Economist print edition and Business Travel tips from our Gulliver Blog.

The World in 2009 Predictions Blog - This year our readers will be able to engage with our World in 2009 editors to do some crystal ball gazing and participate in identifying and discussing trends and events which will surface over the next 12 months . In November we will launch The World in 2009 online fully integrated into Economist.com with comments and interactive maps.


The Economist Debate Platform 2.0: We just began to review the final designs and functionality for our debate platform and I am really excited by the improvements that the design and UX team have been able to incorporate into the debate experience. We will have improved debate navigation, better comment viewing including comments by debate phase, comment views by most recent/least recent and most recommended. Debate 2.0 will also include an expanded archive that will be much easier to use plus a downloadable version of each debate for sharing and printing.

If you are in New York in late October The Economist will presenting three reader events including two live debates. We will post more about these events over next few weeks. If you will be attending any of these events please let us know so we can say hello.

What makes the "severe contest" more severe?

In our previous post on changes to our debate user experience to make the “severe contest” more severe, Katy Zei asked:

I would like to know exactly what Ben meant by severe. Do you mean intellectually demanding or more carefully structured?

It’s a good question, Katy Zei, and something we have been discussing with our editors, brand marketers, product developers, partners (and now readers!) in the past few weeks.

The phrase “severe contest” comes from the introductory article attached to our first print issue, published by our founder, James Wilson, in 1843. The subject of Wilson’s article was the rise of protectionist sentiment in Britain and began with the observation that, despite growing prosperity and the extension of “morality, intelligence and civilisation”

the great material interests of the higher and middle classes, and the physical condition of the labouring and industrial classes, are more and more marked by characters of uncertainty and insecurity.

Wilson blamed this state of affairs on “commercial restrictions”, which

raise up barriers to intercourse, jealousies, animosities and heartburnings between individuals and classes in this country, and again between this country and all others

and declared that the political battle was

a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy timid ignorance obstructing our progress.

My personal take on the severe contest is that it describes the endless struggle between those who fight by proving and demonstrating the rightness of an idea (such as free trade) and those who fight by preying on uncertainty and insecurity to stoke up populist fears. The world of ideas thrives on the courage to embrace challenging (and often unpopular) opinions and the intelligence needed to discover the right answer. The other side of the conflict draws on the fear of change or challenge and ignorance of guiding principles and facts. The battle is endless because the rightness of an idea must be re-proven again and again in the court of public opinion: the forces of timidity and ignorance are never destroyed but merely quelled at best.

As publishers, how can we help to make this severe contest more severe? Surely, the answer is different for every age. In 1842, Wilson’s solution was to launch a newspaper. What about today, with all the technologies and communications infrastructure that we have at our finger tips? I don’t think that anyone has yet come up with a satisfactory answer to that question: a lot of innovation lies ahead, particularly for online publishing. But here are some thoughts about the ingredients we might need:

1. Diversity of thought, ideas and opinion. Our editors and guests can provide some of this. Our readers can provide more: the more fine minds that we convene and help to engage with each other, the more severe the contest.
2. A place or mechanisms for ideas and opinions to connect and compete with each other to prove and demonstrate their rightness, or fitness. This needs lots of innovation in online publishing – and in particular in social computing.
3. Impact. The severe contest is all about beating (or at least quelling) the forces of timid ignorance. A large enough publishing venture is needed for the right ideas to make a difference.
4. Global reach. All the most important and pressing issues are global in nature, more so now even than when Wilson published our first issue in 1843. If our problems are global, the ideas we find to solve them need to be global too – and they have to influence and shape the behaviour of a global audience.

How well are we doing by these yardsticks? Or are these measures of severity wrong or incomplete?

By the way, doug, you asked about future changes to our online debates. We are rebuilding this part of the site now and plan to launch something new in the autumn. I hope we can arrange for some of our readers to test the new platform before we launch and give us feedback on its likely severity. In the meantime, we have forthcoming online debates on energy and the US elections, which I hope you will find useful and interesting (and at least mildly severe).

More debate on debate

Last month, we pointed to the disappointment some of our readers experienced participating in our online debate on China and the Olympics. In particular, some of you felt that personal attacks and off-topic posts wrecked a forum meant for intellectual exploration and reasoned argument.

We thought about making several changes to the way we run our online debates. These included whether we should moderate comments before they are published, and whether we should strictly enforce Oxford rules, the most important of which is that comments from the floor should only be addressed to the debate moderator. In the end, however, we chose instead to make a number of small changes to the debate user experience. In particular, we added the following copy inside the box where readers post their comments:

Type here to address the moderator with your comment. Please remember to stay on topic and to address the substance of arguments.

Our latest online debate, on corporate sustainability, has been much more orderly. Out of the 134 comments readers posted to the debate, just four were from readers addressing each other – and all posts were civil. Overwhelmingly, readers also stuck to the topic and posted a wide and interesting variety of reasoned arguments. As sanmartinian, who skewered us on the China debate, put it (in an off-topic post :)):

Indulge me in a short comment beside the topic. In the previous debate on whether the Olympic Games should be held in Beijing, I made quite a fuss about the incivility of many debaters, mostly from my own side (I voted in favour of the Games being held in Beijing).
Let me say how happy I am to see a vigorous, sometimes passionate debate on a difficult and polemic subject that never descended on the incivility that plagued the Olympics in Beijing debate.
Congratulations to the moderator and all debaters. I do not congratulate the victors simply because I was one of them.

Undoubtedly, our latest debate topic and proposition were, by their nature, less likely to provoke flaming and invective. Nevertheless, we hope that our modest changes have helped somewhat to promote robust and reasoned argument – the severe contest which we embrace as our mission at The Economist online.

Over the summer, we plan to build a second generation of our online debate platform, and hope to make further improvements to the user experience. We have some ideas about how to go about this. We would also welcome your ideas for how we can make our online debate contests that much more severe.

Reputation, reputation, reputation

One of the topics we are discussing in earnest at the moment is reader reputation management on Economist.com. Often called “karma” systems, reputation-management systems allow online communities of contributors and readers to rate their peers, thus bestowing reputation on them. An individual’s reputation is then often tied to the granting of certain publishing or moderation privileges, or enhanced visibility, prominence and status as a contributor to the community.

We think of reputation as something that can be either (a) bestowed by our readers on their fellow reader contributors or (b) bestowed by our editors on our reader contributors. We think that a system which allows readers of The Economist and/or our editors to bestow reputation on our reader contributors would be useful for several reasons:

1. It should encourage our readers to contribute to Economist.com in ways that fellow readers of The Economist find useful and interesting, providing positive incentives to contribute meaningfully to intelligent discussion and debate.
2. It should discourage ad hominem attacks (aka “flaming”) and off-topic and empty contributions by providing readers with a direct and powerful way to penalise such behaviour.
3. It should help our readers find useful and interesting reader contributions more quickly and easily, by allowing them to filter contributions according to the reputation of the contributor.
4. It would allow our editors to introduce editorial guest contributors to the website and signal to our readers their status as guests of our editors.

Are we thinking about reputation in the right way? Would you find such a system useful? And how should we design and build it? (We have some ideas already, which we will share in a later post).

How can we make reader comments more portable?

Our marketing colleagues pointed us to this blog post by Andrew Sullivan about a comment published to Economist.com. We found it most pleasing that Mr Sullivan is not only reading our readers’ comments, but being moved to blog about them. But it also got us thinking about how we publish reader comments. We suspect that we have a shared interest with our readers in wanting your contributions to our website to be as widely read and discussed (and commented upon) as possible, both on Economist.com and off domain. So how do we change the way we publish comments (the technology, the legal environment, the design) to promote their portability? And what choices and tools should we put in front of our readers so that you control how, and where, your comments get published?