The Dawning of a New Era -- 2003!

It seems that the Buffalo News might be looking at relaunching its Web operation, which has long been an absolute joke. Alan and BuffaloGeek both comment on this today. I say, Great -- although I have to note that this potential "new Buffalo.com portal" frankly sounds a lot like Syracuse.com, which has been in existence in its current state for several years. They've got blogs and RSS and all that good stuff already, while the News is still operating its crappy, hard-to-navigate, not-updated-until-midmorning 1998-era website.

It is heartening, a little, to see that Margaret Sullivan's article mentions blogs without stopping to say "Hey, there's these new website thingamajig's called 'blogs'!", which used to be the only way the News would approach Blogistan. And it's even more heartening to see Jennifer actually quoted in a story that just treats her blog for what it is: a resource that pertains to the story in question. This, I think, is when we know that blogs have started to really become effective: when newspaper articles can cite them in a way that assumes that the readership already knows what the hell a blog is. Now that is progress.

(And while the News now apparently has clickable URLs in its online versions of articles, there's still a lot of ineptitude there. The story that links Jen's blog also has a sidebar, here, which can't be accessed at all from the Web version of the article; and neither can the main article be accessed via the sidebar, if you come to the sidebar first. If you're reading the News online exclusively, you might well never realize these two articles are meant to go together. Whoever the News is paying to do their website had better be really worried about the possibility of the News finding out just how ineptly the job has been done, lo these many years.)