SCN: websites to feature

[Rod Clark]

Terry Trimingham wrote:
> In my opinion, we need to promote SCN and all the cool stuff
> it does.

Terry, 

   Which "cool stuff" do people (that is, the general public)
really think of, when they think of SCN? 

   Two of the areas that people considered the "coolest" (which
is to say, they were areas of SCN that demonstrably grew in
popularity during 2000) were Web hosting for nonprofits and our
growing audience for the variety of local information offered on
the SCN home page. 

   Unfortunately, both of those have become declining areas this
year. Our text-only dialup is used less and less. Few people use
SCN for personal Web sites because it's so difficult compared to
other choices. So our "cool" factor rests on fewer distinctions
these days than it might.

   But we do still have one other cool thing - the Community
menus that embrace a wide range of people's local interests and
concerns. SCN is well known for that, and it has a lot to do
with why people might still think SCN is "cool," even though
practically everything else about SCN has lost any semblance of
leadership in its field. The Community menus and the matching
focus of the 2000-era SCN home page were the two things that the
Seattle Times cited when it included SCN as an "essential"
Seattle site in its survey of the 100 most essential Web sites
in the summer of 2000.

   The new leadership of SCN did away with one of those
sucesses, and now I hear people proposing to do away with the
other and more important one, the Community menus. Shouldn't we
try to keep a sense of our connection to the whole city, and
realize that that's what has attracted most of the good regard
that people have for SCN?

> For that reason, I think we should concentrate on SCN sites.
> It is not that there isn't anything else good out there, it is
> just that we need to beat our own drum as much as we can.

   That's a recipe for limiting our audience to a small number
of people. That's like KING 5 not mentioning any community
issues except from those organizations hosted on
hometeamcommunity.com. For any media site with an overall
community purpose to do that is really counterproductive, both
in terms of attracting a sizable audience and in terms of
reaching out to people who haven't historically had Web sites on
SCN - such as the black community and others who need to be
included in whatever dialog, communications and public
understanding we hope to promote in a more effective way among
people in Seattle.

> I also happen to agree with Lois about not wanting to promote
> sites that our basic users can't even access because they
> don't follow SCN web guidelines. That just doesn't make sense.
> I know a few folks that still only use lynx, SCN has always
> been kind to lynx users.

   SCN's own pages are accessible in Lynx, and always should be.
But only a fraction of a percent of our site's viewers use Lynx.
We can't simply ignore most of the Internet just because the
only browser that SCN provides is so obsolete that almost no one
uses it anymore. Even people who use SCN's Lynx can go to a
library to see the many local sites on our menus as they are
intended to be seen.

   It is the information content of Seattle area sites, not
their technical use of certain HTML tags, that has guided
content selection for SCN's menus and for the home page for the
past several years. It's harmful to the wider interests of
people throughout our city to take such a step backwards as to
limit people's knowledge to a small amount of content based on
outdated technical grounds.

Rod Clark
webeditors@#scn.org

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