SCN: websites to feature

[patrick]

I can't see how community menus could, or would, be removed. That is
like taking the tires off of the car you want to drive everyday.

Patrick


--- Rod Clark <bb615 at scn.org> wrote:
> 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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