The phases of engagement and the best answer ever

Since 2009, my research partner and I have been studying the changes at the Christian Science Monitor in its efforts to morph into a Web-first newsroom.

Its success in increasing page views has been well documented. Using search-engine optimization and frequent news updates, its site regularly tops 30 million page views a month, and the organization has earned a spot among the 250 most visited U.S. sites on the Web.

But during our research visits, we’ve often heard reporters and editors struggle with how to transform the drive-by SEO audience to one that is more engaged, more invested in the Monitor itself.

Many other news organizations, marketers, and Web producers have become obsessed with this idea as well. As someone working with the next generation of content creators, I have dedicated much time developing my own model to understand how engagement happens.

A simple model

For years, I’ve been attracted to the uses-and-gratifications model of media behavior, which simply states that people use media to satisfy certain communication needs. But how does this process evolve? And how do we build regular usage and make our sites a media habit?

Integrating several threads of innovation and media research, I came up with four primary phases:

1. ATTENTION: It begins with an appreciation for SEO and messaging. Do we have something that will grab people’s attention from the mass of information already available to them?
2. USAGE: Ease of use is vital for luring new users. Usability experts like Jakob Nielsen regularly remind us of the importance of clean, responsive design, and if a site/app/program is too difficult to use, users often will abandon it, especially if they are not emotionally attached or invested in the content.
3. HABIT: Once users have overcome the trepidation of trying something new, we need to use consistent content to keep people coming back. And that consistency should come in quantity (frequency of updating) and quality (meaningful, well-produced content). It is finding the right balance between quantity and quality that so many organizations struggle with. This part of the process is more transactional and informational: Are we providing the type of content users need to satisfy what they’re looking for?
4. COMMUNITY: After securing the intellectual commitment, we must establish that emotional investment in our site by building community. It is this phase where so many news organizations and businesses fail, and the social media succeed so dramatically. To develop this human connection, we must be willing to share our site with the audience. Allow them to contribute photos, comments, and other user-generated content. Make them feel a part of the site.

I find this simplified model — which incorporates ideas from diffusion of innovations, the theory of media attendance, the Media Choice Model, and engagement research — resonates more effectively with my students than more complex formulations (such as Philip Napoli’s definitive  conception of engagement in his book Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audiences).

The best answer ever

I teach this model to my students in my Web Communication class, a junior/senior level class in our Multimedia Production and Journalism program, and a question about the idea inevitably appears on my exams. As I tell my students, I am most concerned with concepts rather than terminology; I want them to articulate clearly what’s happening at each stage, rather than just regurgitating my lecture blather.

And so, this past semester, one student took me at my word.

I share this answer with her permission. (The spelling-error comment refers to an error on her own site that we discovered during her final presentation.) Enjoy.

• First: Discovery of a site. “Well, hello there,” its viewer purrs. “What have we here? Is this worth my time? Is it going to play games with me and break my heart with a lack of updates, shoddy information, or spelling errors (that may very well be tragic mistakes and not actually errors because son is actually a word, just not the right word)? Hmm. Let’s take a look…”
• Second: Getting to know a site. “That’s a snazzy nav bar,” its viewer giggles. “And I can’t get over how nicely this content is organized! Holy cow, those tags group things well! It seems like I can find exactly what I’m looking for before I even start looking for it.”
• Third: Regular use of a site. “We’re in it for the long haul,” its viewer promises. “You and I are an item now. You’ve proven your worth, and I want to commit my valuable Web time to you.”
• Fourth: Interacting with a site. “I’ve gotten up enough courage to make my presence known to you,” its viewer proclaims. “I am going to post in your comment section and like you on Facebook and re-tweet your tweets to show the world how much I’m devoted to you. I’ll shout your existence to the world.”

Interpreting polls: Motivated interviewees, motivated voters?

Prior to the first Obama-Romney debate, some critics blasted polls as Democratic-leaning.

The more accurate statement: Polls reflect the people more willing to answer pollsters at the time of the poll. And now, it seems Republicans are the more motivated interviewees.

Before the debate

Before the debate, Democratic voters were motivated. After the conventions, President Obama’s lead had been growing slowly but steadily. A September poll from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press showed Obama with a 51-43 lead over Romney.

A look at the poll’s sample shows a greater number of Democratic voters responding:

Soon after, Republican candidate Mitt Romney committed several gaffes (e.g. his reaction to the attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya and the “47 percent” comment), and it seemed Obama’s lead was growing. Some Republicans even came out publicly with their frustrations with Romney’s campaign.

After the debate

But then came the first debate, which, by most accounts, Romney won handily. Republicans and conservatives were energized by his feisty, focused performance.

And, it seems, they became more willing to answer pollsters’ questions.

The latest Pew poll released Oct. 8 showed Romney above Obama among likely voters, with a 49-45 advantage.

Unlike earlier polls, Pew captured marginally more Republican voters than Democrats:

Making sense of the polls

Does that mean the poll is “biased”? Pollsters say no because you are grabbing a random sample of the entire U.S. population, which gives everyone an equal shot at participating. Polls are a moving target, something that the sage Nate Silver reminds of consistently in his must-read FiveThirtyEight blog; it’s best to look at a collection of polls and make sense of the aggregated data.

One concrete conclusion we can draw: The race is extremely tight, and at this stage, it’s impossible to know how many of those who say they support Obama or Romney today actually come out to vote for those candidates on Election Day.

#jcarn: Measuring journalism

Note: This post is another installment for the Carnival of Journalism project, where people passionate about journalism are sharing ideas in the blogosphere about ways to preserve and improve the craft.

This month’s prompt:

What’s the best way — or ways — to measure journalism and how?

The root of journalism is truth, and the time-tested method that journalists have to uncover that truth is verification. If we want to measure journalism, it must begin here.

Respected journalists Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel explored this idea more than a decade ago as part of their work with the Committee of Concerned Journalists, which they codified in their book The Elements of Journalism. As they noted, what sets journalists apart from every other type of content creator — entertainer, technologist, pundit — is verification.

Simply put, verification is checking out everything with multiple sources. I think of the adage I learned early in my journalism career:

If your mother says she loves you, check it out.

It’s only semi-facetious. It doesn’t mean your mother is a liar. It just means she may not be quite accurate.

Maybe she wasn’t talking to you.

Maybe her definition of “love” doesn’t jibe with conventional wisdom.

Maybe she’s not really your mother.

In today’s environment of the immediate and the ephemeral, it’s ever more important to verify the drive-by comments, the frenetic machine gun of news. It’s too easy to retweet, reblog, or republish what’s happening with the claim that the rush of information requires us to be first rather than accurate.

What does the audience want?

What’s clouding journalism today is the need for audience. In such a fragmented environment, how do we generate enough interest — in terms of page views, time spent on site, or other measures of engagement — to secure advertising to pay the bills?

We tap into Google Trends and try to SEO our headlines and content to lure people to our website. We crank up the level of content with frequent updating — sometimes including links to hot content that we haven’t independently verified. The goal is noble: Get them to our site so they can see our real, verified journalism.

But some pockets of experimentation are turning that idea on its head. Gawker has begun finding that original content may be generating more meaningful connections than its SEO junk. Salon recently noted its recent upsurge in traffic came from abandoning the aggregation gold rush. And ProPublica has figured out how to win Pulitzer Prizes and remain financially viable (PDF) without buying into the hype.

Maintaining credibility

As Philip Napoli notes in his book Audience Evolution, a large audience may not be the most engaged. In the age of social media, a small but motivated group can make a big noise.

But the information has to be accurate. Witness the backlash regarding Invisible Children and the #stopkony campaign. After the initial rush of eye-candy addicts, more thoughtful writers began questioning the group’s methods, spending, and accuracy.

Even credible, well-read organizations such as Mashable fall into this trap. The all-things-social-media site recently posted an item with the misleading title “Top 10 Social Media-Savvy Universities [STUDY].” As you dig deeper into the study, you find that the list is actually drawn from already culled list of 25 UK universities and 25 U.S. universities.

Even the study’s author notes this clarification in the comments of the story:

Journalism’s value/impact can come from reaffirming its role as the verifier without agenda. Places such as FactCheck.org and PolitiFact serve as role models for our aspirations of verification.

Measuring verification

Measurement assumes quantification, and some ideas — such as verification — are better evaluated qualitatively. Creating a measure requires including some attributes and excluding others; inevitably, such measures are always imperfect approximations, especially when it comes to complex concepts.

But we can establish a few expectations, with a little help from Kovach and Rosenstiel:

• Transparency: Where did the information come from? Are you transparent about your sources? Post your spreadsheets through Google Docs and your documents on DocumentCloud. Embrace an open-source ethic. Disclose what you were unable to confirm.
• Consistency: Test information from every source, even your mother. Don’t rely exclusively on secondary sources; check the primary information yourself to ensure it is presented accurately with context.
• Context: Link to sources you’ve used to verify your content, and provide access to full interviews to bolster confidence that you’re not cherry-picking information to support an agenda. Make sure you’re representing all nuances and resisting the urge to simplify everything to two sides.

Italian schoolteacher Tommaso De Benedetti turned humilating news organizations into an art form with his mock Twitter accounts of Harmid Karzai, Bashar al-Assad, and other world leaders. He found that some news organizations quickly retweeted information without verification — including news that Fidel Castro had died.

In his interview with The Guardian, he may have created the journalistic warning for the Internet age: “Twitter works well for deaths.”

Or maybe we should craft a new adage:

If your mother tweets her death, check it out.

Free surfing: Where does your brain go?

It usually happens on a Sunday morning, in the quiet of the solitary kitchen.

The house is asleep. The coffee is fresh. The sun is rising. And I humbly drift through the Web, aimlessly consuming content insightful and insipid.

It’s not anything I intend to do. I usually start by reviewing Google+ or scanning the New York Times home page or clicking on a link from a friend’s e-mail or tweet. Suddenly, 45 minutes have passed, 10 tabs are open on my browser, and the thought flashes: “How did I get here?”

This type of experience in part inspired Nicholas Carr’s writing The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, a book I expected to dislike but instead found exhilarating. Instead of a cherry-picking screed railing against technology, it’s a thoughtful exploration of what we know — and have yet to learn — about how this interconnected, plugged-in life is affecting us.

Since reading it, I find myself stopping every once in a while and retracing my technological steps. Too many times, I’ve passively accepted my consumption like a French-fry carnivore at McDonald’s.

So this past Sunday morning, with browser tabbed to capacity, I found myself wondering once again, “How did I get here?”

WordPress

Each morning, I compile a list of local headlines for my community news site, SGFNews.org, which I’ve set up at WordPress.com.

Unfortunately, when I log into WordPress, I get the dreaded Freshly Pressed screen, a pleasantly presented buffet of images, blog titles, and headlines seductively gesturing to be clicked.

This morning, my eyes were drawn to a screenshot from “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II,” one of my favorite movies from the past year.

Being a movie buff, I clicked on the link to Cut the Crap Movie Reviews, an entertaining blog of short reviews. It was a fruitful detour; I had not heard of half of the movies on the list.

Google+

Weekends are my time to delve into media trends and research. It’s also my time to catch up with neglected social media such as Google+ and Pinterest (my primary medium is Twitter).

This morning, I logged into my Google+ account for the first time in a couple of weeks. One of the first headlines posted by Dan Gillmor, noted journalist and media thinker, caught my attention:

I did not immediately make the connection, but the article reminded me that Zaslow co-wrote The Last Lecture, the story of Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University professor who gave an inspiring talk about life’s lessons. The Wall Street Journal also noted Zaslow’s dedication to his wife and daughters, significant details that touched me as a husband and father.

Another Google+ headline from Wired caught my eye:

Privacy has become a flashpoint for me — it’s one of the reasons I use Facebook only while holding my nose — and I shared the article on Google+ and Twitter without hesitation.

Using Google+’s feed-view buttons, I then focused on updates from Friends. My research partner Carrie Brown-Smith led me to two fascinating pieces: The WeMedia.com PitchIt Challenge offering $50,000 for digital-media startups and an Advertising Age article about studying brand perceptions of online consumers.

I briefly considered the possibility of pitching my community news site to the challenge. I also hovered over the Advertising Age comments and thought of criticizing the headline “GE Study Proves Consumers Respond More to Shared Content,” as studies do not prove hypotheses. But thought did not turn to action, and I returned to my Google+ stream.

Next came a blog post titled “And Deliver Us From Distraction: Understanding Resistance to Media Life,” from Seth Lewis, an insightful media scholar at the University of Minnesota I’ve gotten to know in the academic world.

But the blog post wasn’t the only thing lighting up my brain. The site design was interesting, and I noticed the design was created by one of the blog’s co-writers, Joshua Braun, another media scholar.

At his site, he highlighted one of his published papers that fit right in with a study I’m working on. I headed to our university library site and found the paper, “Hosting the Public Discourse, Hosting the Public.”

Sexist startups

My last intellectual side road came courtesy of Kathy Gill, a sharp educator at the University of Washington whom I have connected with through the Carnival of Journalism blog group.

I clicked on the post by Dan Shapiro that recounted a disrespectful introduction of Rebecca Lovell as she was about to moderate a panel on funding startups. The man introducing her said:

Rebecca’s one of the smartest ladies I know, and I thought that she was a perfect pick for the role of moderator.  When we selected Rebecca and she said yes, she was a sexy single woman. And since that time, she’s become a sexy married woman, and so I wanted her lucky new spouse to stand up.  So we’ve got not only a very talented, but a happy moderator.

The post struck a chord with me. I am continually amazed that in 2012 we still hear this kind of — as Shapiro put it — crap. Did we not leave this behind with the age of the Mad Men?

The next item I clicked on from Gill’s stream involved storytelling with infographics. As one of my classes has to create an infographic as an assignment this semester, I thought the post would be particularly useful, and I saved it to my Diigo account.

And then the thought hit me: “How did I get here?”

What I learned

Thinking about my free surf led me to a few conclusions:

• Free surfing can be insightful: In an hour of surfing, I had discovered a couple of helpful articles for my classes, a paper for one of my research projects, and a potential grant source for my community news site.
• Emotions drive clicks. In some instances, the provocative subjects lured me during the free surf. Perhaps sadness was lingering from the news of Whitney Houston’s death, but I clicked on the Zaslow piece and the startup post partly because of visceral reactions to the content.
• Sharing equals power. “Free surf” is a misnomer; I had several trusted guides from my social network leading me to useful content. In fact, most of my content discovery comes through this method (usually through Twitter instead of Google+). And I shared a few of the items I found with my own networks.
• The stream induces anxiety. As someone whose stock in trade is information, I find that the constant exposure to an ever-growing influx does spark a sense of anxiety: How do I keep up with all of this? How can I accomplish everything I need to get done?
  

Does this experience jibe with yours? Where do your free surfs lead you in the silence of a Sunday morning?

Five ways to detect Internet BS

In the quest for page views and visitors, bloggers and content creators skate the ethical borders.

They steal content. They create meaningless lists. They perpetuate inaccuracy with statistically ridiculous online polls.

Do not nibble on these cognitive candy bars; they make for flabby brains.

So I offer you a post that is not pilfered, that is accurate as far as I know. I hope it will bring meaning and substance to your online diet.

1. Top 75 ways to …

Have you noticed the proliferation of lists (including this one)? People like them because they are easy to scan, digest, and comment upon. It’s like the weather: Everyone can comment on their favorite song, dog breed, gluten-free cereal, etc.

Often, these lists are meant to spark an emotional reaction — How dare you leave out my favorite song, dog breed, gluten-free cereal, etc.! — and create “engagement.” They’re also designed to pump up page views by putting each item on its own Web page.

Be especially wary of lists with more than 10 items.

The best compilations I find don’t actually use the word “list” anywhere in them. Two of my favorites: The Big Picture, which collects the best photojournalism from around the Web daily (by Boston.com); and Brain Pickings, which curates some of the most thought-provoking content from the Internet.

2. Who’s your favorite…?

As a researcher, I find online polls particularly offensive. They give the veneer of validity, presenting quantitative “findings” to support a given claim.

The problem? Statistically valid polls depend on a random sample of a given population. In an open online poll, the visitors to a given site decide whether to participate; there’s no control over the sample. The results are meaningless in a larger context.

The questions are often meant to provoke a response rather than elicit valuable information.

The most reliable polls (e.g. ones from Pew Research or Gallup) will provide their methodology, questionnaire, sample size, and margin of error. They will carefully pull together a list from which anyone from the population could be randomly selected. And they will be equally careful in how they interpret the results.

3. Whose content is it anyway?

We’ve all done it. Searching for a quick answer, we Google our query and click on the first reasonable headline. We scan the article, and if the information is useful, we smack our lips and continue on merrily with our day, with little regard for the actual source of the information.

Often, content farms scrape the Web for posts and articles on a given topic and shamelessly repost them with credit lines in the small print. In my opinion, this plagiarism is a lazy, misleading way to manufacture false credibility.

Like the multi-paged list, this ploy is another attempt to pad page-view numbers to lure advertisers and ultimately revenue.

4. Coffee is [bad, neutral, good] for you.

Good journalists know there is a wealth of fascinating, insightful academic research available for public consumption. Academics are often more concerned with publishing in peer-reviewed journals than the public sphere, making this source a rich mine for the resourceful writer.

The key, however, is putting that research into perspective. No single study or paper exists in a vacuum. Research must be tested, validated, and corroborated.

Still, some will elevate a solitary study to inerrant status. Those in search of click-throughs opt for the sexy headline — “Coffee is good for you, says science” — and selectively cite the studies that support their point of view.

5. Don’t believe that S.O.B.

As with academic cherry-picking, the polarized blogosphere has a nasty habit of taking quotes out of context and elevating them to the level of scandal.

Take a quotation from Mitt Romney that made the rounds from one of the GOP primary debates:

…I like being able to fire people…

For people who focus on Romney’s stint as head of Bain Capital, it fits the narrative of Romney as the evil CEO who cuts thousands of jobs. The problem is the quotation is out of context.

Watch the entire quote:

Even his opponents in the GOP primary called off the critics to say his comments were being taken out of context — but not before the Internet masses feasted upon the supposed “gaffe.”

It is this misrepresentation of fact that affects all of us who hope to gain credible knowledge from the Internet. Unfortunately, as authors Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel note in Blur: How to Know What’s True in the Age of Information Overload, it’s up to us as content consumers to be skeptical of all we encounter.

Kovach and Rosenstiel offer six questions to consider when hearing or reading information:

• What kind of content am I encountering?
• Is the information complete, and if not, what is missing?
• Who or what are the sources, and why should I believe them?
• What evidence is presented, and how was it tested or vetted?
• What might be an alternative explanation or understanding?
• Am I learning what I need to?

The technological explosion brought on by the Internet has democratized the ability to consume and create information. It has expanded our minds and empowers us to take action.

But it has also required us to become more discerning, skeptical consumers.

#jcarn: Asking the right question about capitalism and journalism: What is value?

Note: This post is another installment for the Carnival of Journalism project, where people passionate about journalism are sharing ideas in the blogosphere about ways to preserve and improve the craft.

This month’s prompt:

Can a good journalist also be a good capitalist? If so, how? Or why not?

The simple answer is yes, someone can be good at doing journalism and making money. The problem is it’s the wrong question.

Umair Haque, a creative thinker and blogger who recently published the e-book “Betterness: Economic for Humans,” has it right. He urges organizations to seek arête — virtue — to “maximize human potential and minimize suffering, instead of merely maximizing near-term profit, shareholder value, or revenue.” (p. 40)

It’s a grand variation of a motto many journalists cite: Comfort the afflicted; afflict the comfortable. As journalists, we want to improve the public good through our research, investigations, and stories. The reason so many of us are so passionate about this crazy craft that consumes our lives is we believe it can change the world and elevate the human condition.

The problem with the question as stated is we’ve seen what the profit motive can do to journalism. It led to the yellow journalism of the late 19th century, when stories were fabricated and sensationalized for the sake of sales. Indeed, the Christian Science Monitor and the Missouri School of Journalism were created and the New York Times evolved under Adolph Ochs as responses to the market-driven journalism of the day.

They were pursuing a greater goal, a greater journalism beyond profits.

We are at a similar crossroads today, as publicly traded media giants contort and flounder trying to meet competitive threats from all sides.

Take Gannett Co. Inc., the nation’s largest newspaper company. Like many of our major media companies, it has focused on maximizing shareholder value, a capitalist virtue. To meet the expectations of the market, it laid off 700 employees in July — its fourth major layoff in three years.

Shortly thereafter, CEO Craig Dubow resigned from the company because of health problems and received a $37.1 million payout per his employment contract. Yet Gannett is still struggling to find its way as a journalistic enterprise.

The market-driven model does have its share of successes in today’s media environment: Pixar, Google, Apple. When Steve Jobs died in October, many drew inspiration from his quotation about success:

My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. [T]he products, not the profits, were the motivation. [Former Apple CEO John] Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything.

As we’ve discovered lately, though, even Jobs and Apple made some concessions to be able to manufacture millions of iPods, iPhones, and iPads to feed the technological masses (and, not coincidentally, its income statement).

Fortunately, journalists at news organizations big and small are figuring out a way beyond the traditional free markets we’ve touted for so many years:

• NPR: National Public Radio has gradually been weaning itself from public dollars to develop self-sustaining support through grants and listener donations. Joan Kroc, the wife of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc, donated more than $200 million from her estate and helped firm the financial footing of the nonprofit news organization.
• ProPublica: This nonprofit website was the first online-only organization to win a Pulitzer Prize for its journalistic excellence. In three years, its donations have grown from 18 percent of total contributions in 2009 to almost half in 2011.
• MinnPost: One of the first high-profile ventures into nonprofit online journalism, MinnPost.com made its way into the black this year.
• WellCommons: This public-health community-journalism site, created by Jane Stevens as part of the for-profit Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World media organization, has connected the community and a small staff to focus on health issues facing Lawrence. Stevens is now creating her own version of that model in California.

The focus in these examples is financial viability, not profitability. The income statement makes the journalism possible, and it’s this reality that inspired the original #jcarn prompt. But the driving force in these examples is the journalism, the greater public good, arête. If we focus too much on the market, on the push for profitability, the inevitable result becomes dollar signs over human beings.

Today’s list of great capitalists would have to include Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway Inc. had more than $372 billion in assets as of third quarter 2011. But even a great capitalist such as he considers the idea of taxes in the context of society, not in terms of personal gain. As he told ABC News recently:

The question is what is fair when you have to raise multi-trillions to fund the United States of America.

It is in this context we should view Berkshire Hathaway’s purchase of the Omaha World Herald. Buffett would not have bought into the newspaper if he did not see inherent value. The question is how much profit is enough for value: Forty percent? Ten percent? One?

For Buffett, “value” includes the public good. As he said at the press conference announcing the sale:

I think newspapers . . . have a decent future. It won’t be like the past. But there are still a lot of things newspapers can do better than any other media. They not only can be sustained, but are important.

They not only can be sustained, but are important. It is here that our conversation should begin.

#jcarn: Habits emerge from integration

Note: This post is another installment for the Carnival of Journalism project, where people passionate about journalism are sharing ideas in the blogosphere about ways to preserve and improve the craft.

This month’s query:

How do you decide to dedicate time to a new tool/platform/gadget? What is the process you go through mentally? And then later – how do you convince others to go through that process? And, last: How do you ensure that the tools you do adopt are used once the “newness” factor fades?

———

My job requires me to try everything (Quora). And try I do (Yahoo! Pipes).

But the technologies that stick (Google) are ones that integrate (Diigo) with my existing workflow (Twitter). I typically don’t stick with a shiny, new toy (Squidoo) unless it’s easy to use (Tumblr), works on multiple platforms (Dropbox), or expands the function (Instapaper) of my existing network of technology.

Of course, some platforms are so innovative (Storify) and useful (Iterasi) that I have to use them to satisfy particular tasks (Wordle). Others are so ubiquitous (Facebook) that they demand I participate on occasion, even if I detest the medium. Fortunately, some never seem to rise to that level (Gowalla), perhaps because I’ve already found some other technology that’s similar and fits my web of hardware and software more effectively (Foursquare).

My budget is limited, so I often wait an iteration before adopting new hardware (iPad), which can work to my advantage (iPhone) because the technological kinks get worked out.

Once bitten, though, I often become a disciple through demonstration (StumbleUpon) and help others use the technology to their advantage (WordPress).

If they don’t embrace it as I do, I don’t push it. Ultimately, the things that work for me (AcidPlanet) may not work for others, and vice versa (myspace). What’s important is that we choose what best fits us, not everyone else.