UC£M: Fifth Exercise in Multimedia Creation - Analysis of Ineractivity Elements in different Homepages

1. Study of the interactive elements in different Information Homepages:
A journalistic communication medium, a newsportal, a social news board.

If we enter homepages nowadays, we see enormous differences to the ones 3 years ago.
The Homepages today, are in need of interactivity elements, like RSS-feeds, Foums, Hyperlinks, Comment Writing and many more. The more interactivity you offer the more likely is it that you are able to attract more and more participants to your website. In General the two journalism professors at Boston College, McMillan and Downes (1998) wrote that interactivity increases as:
• the goal of communication is more to exchange information than to persuade participants have greater control of the communication environment
• participants take an active role to fully benefit from the communication
• participants act and react to messages via two-way communication
• timing of communication is flexible and responsive to demands of participants
• communication environment creates a sense of place

To further proceed with attracting customers newspapers ahould concentrate on the following particular factors:
• Detect visitors and track their behavior and interests
• Gather analytics and usage information
• Optimize and personalize content presentation dynamically by audience
• Enable online communities through “social media” such as Blogs, and external social site content
• Provide for comments and "user generated content" direct from your site visitors

Referring to above mentioned results we can conclude, that particularly mediums of qualitative journalistic communication and newsportals should concentrate on Detect visitors and track their behavior and interests through interaction, eg RSS feeds, Optimize and personalize content presentation dynamically, eg Startpage. They should additionally offer the possibilty to the readers, to give personal feedback directly to the articels. In this way they create a win-win situation, because the reader gains more satisfaction by expressing his opinión, and the newspaper can gain deeper knowledge of user’s needs and possible improvements needed for the homepage.

2. Elige un medio digital (puede ser regional o nacional); el portal de noticias es Terra.es y el marcador es Meneame.net;

The New York Times
One of the most impressive Newspapers from my oint of view is The New Cork Times.
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded in 1851 and published in New York City. The largest metropolitan newspaper in the United Status. Regarding the interactivity features of the New York Times, they are one of the leaders and is having a strong presence on the Web since 1995, and has been ranked one of the top Web sites. Accessing some articles requires registration, though this can be bypassed by using a link generator or in some cases through Times RSS feeds. The website had 555 million pageviews in March 2005. The domain nytimes.com attracted at least 146 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.comstudy. The Times website ranks 59th by number of unique visitors, with over 14 million unique visitors in August 2008. Besides the RSS feeds The Times is also the first newspaper to offer a video game as part of its editorial content, Food Import Folly by Persuasive Games.

Terra.es
Terra Networks usually referred to as "Terra", is an Internet multinational company with headquarters in Spain. Part of Telefónica Group (the former Spain's public telephone monopoly and now one of the most important telecommunications companies in the world), Terra operates both as a web portal and/or an internet access provider in the U.S., Spain, and 16 Latin American countries. Terra was publicly traded on NASDAQ under the symbol TRLY and on the Spanish stock market under the symbol TRR.Terra was founded in 1999 by Juan Villalonga, Telefonica's president between 1996 and 2000, and quickly turned into a major internet player through the aggressive acquisition of several local startups in main Latin American markets: Olé (Spain), Zaz (Brazil), Infosel (Mexico), Gauchonet y Donde (Argentina), Chevere (Venezuela).

Regarding the interactivity of terra.es the users can find many possibilities, like for example:
• Blogs
• Chat
• Compras
• Correo
• Descargas de software
• Foros
• Personaliza tu móvil
• Recarga Movistar
• Envía SMS/MMS
These features help, resides, the entertainment sections, to bind the users more and more to terra.es / terra.com.


Meneame.net
Meneame.net is a Spanish Language based Social Voting site.With many improvements and a new layout v3.0 is hoping to ensure Meneame’s position as the top Spanish based social voting site.
Meneame.net is Spanish language based but can often be translated into English.
My first impression was that it seems kina of unorganized and World not force me to use it.
However i talos offers binding interctivities featuers, called +menéame:
• para móviles
• nótame
• blog
• Jaiku
• Twitter
Furthermore meneame.net offers its users the possibility of regstering for RSS feeds about:
• publicadas
• en cola
• todos los comentarios

What is very useful and makes Website really authentic, is the fact that it added a ranking to each user. That gives an idea of how many people have a higher karma. So all that will have 20 # 1, and those with 6, for example, also have the same ranking as all others with the same karma. The ranking is visible in the user profile and also in the tooltips. It is updated instantly, meaning that if someone modifies it karma during the day the change is reflected immediately.


3. Analiza los espacios que tiene el medio para lograr la interacción del usuario, así como el modo que tienen el portal y el marcador de buscar la participación de los usuarios (es necesario o no registrarse…)

For users it is getting more and more important to Express themselves in the media, to create a image and a profile of themselves. However, many useres also are affriad of loosing their control of personal information circulating in the WWW. On the otherside Companies not just use the registration for gathbering useful information about their users to push for example the circulation spiral. Furtermore its also a way to guarantee higher quality, especially in social networking homepages.
Therefore registartion is a comlicated point to judge about. A newspaper who offers many interactive features, has a higher chance for registration of useres, then some which just offer a couple of features.
However, nowadays interactivity features, like RSS-feeds, possible profile creation, Blogs and personal feebacks should be seen as basis for every succesfull homepage.