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Yahoo News is one of the most popular news web sites in the world. It has a problem, though. Every major story comes with a generous helping of the most vile hate speech you’ve ever seen.

Earlier this year, Yahoo News restored its long-mothballed comments feature. The given explanation was that Yahoo’s readers demanded a platform to interact with the news. A Yahoo exec told PaidContent.org: ”[T]the feedback from the audience was that the right to comment was sort of an extension of their First Amendment rights.” User engagement is also good for business, since time on site is one metric Internet companies use to set ad rates.

I’m a fan of interaction and free discourse, but let’s face it: Comments on news stories are about the lamest form of user engagement on the Internet. On the some of the more popular sites, comments are a festering cesspool of pure mean. The nastiness comes from two sources. The first is trolls: Creative geeks who make a hobby out of posting the most offensive messages they can think of, to get a rise out of people. The second is true bigots, some of whom post creepy threats of violence. I have a bad feeling that a lot of the people posting comments on Yahoo are not goofing around. This a thriving community of actual racists!

Compared to its peers—AOL, USA Today, The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC—Yahoo comments are spectacularly bad, and they show up in your face, at the bottom of every story. Anyone reading the news, including children curious about the world they live in, will certainly see them.

How bad are we talking about? I’ve collected a few choice comments from Yahoo News over the last few days. Read on. Warning: Rough language ahead.

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Comment: Texas_Dave: blacks….the bodies of humans…the minds of animals.

Comment: Joeg: Too many colored people in office !

Comment: AlwaysRight: If it wasn’t for white people… blacks and browns would still be poking bugs with sharp pointy sticks in thier loin cloths.

Comment: Zorro: Moslems live to kill each other,but they prefer to kill non-muslims, that’s why Pakistan and Afghanistan will never cooperate with the West.We should not intervene and let those animals exterminate each other.

Comment: DISTURBED: I HAVE AN IDEA: WE ERECT A HUGE CATTLE FUNNEL IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FENCE WITH A SIGN READING: FREE LEGAL U.S. ENTRY 3 DAYS ONLY! OUR OBAMA ADMINISTRATION WILL LEAD THE WAY! AND ON OUR SIDE BY THE OPENING YOU SET ME UP IN A TOWER- WITH FLOODLIGHTS, MY CHAINGUN, AND 5 MILLION ROUNDS! OH AND LOUDSPEAKERS WITH THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER CRANKED 24/7 ! I THINK AFTER THE FIRST DAY THEY’LL GET THE POINT- YOU’RE NOT WELCOME !

Comment: Bigfoot: She is an ugly racist B_itch, hang her and hang her high

Comment: BeRevealer: This is an example of how black people run their country. Not one country with black leadership is without violence on a large scale and poverty of the masses but not the leadership. Could be coming to a city near you the way things are heading in the USA!!

Comment: Burney D: Solution to Border problem, kill all the men and breed all the women, soon they’ll all be white.

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Whew. Welcome back from the worst place in the universe.

But please don’t form your opinion from my sampling alone. Go to Yahoo News, pick any story, and read the comments yourself. As I write this, the story about Obama apologizing to Sherrod has 29,000 comments. The one about unemployment benefits has 44,000.

Yahoo has some filters, including a peer voting system that’s supposed to hide offensive comments. None of the comments above was blocked when I found it. But some are. If you spend any time on Yahoo News, you’ll notice that comments denouncing the hate or affirming a liberal point of view are often slammed with Yahoo’s “thumbs down” button until they are hidden from view. This comment was blocked: “Right-wing corporate media (FOX) loves to lie to the stupit & racist people they will belive anything.” And so was this one: “We need to ban guns from the continent to stop the violence.”

Meanwhile, this comment on the immigration story has 16 thumbs-up and zero thumbs-down:

By now, you’re probably feeling angry. Here’s what I’d like you to do with that feeling. Go about your business and remember that one day you might bump into someone who works for Yahoo News. I want you to make that person a hero. When you see them, ask them:

• Are you proud of the Yahoo News comments feature?
• Are your managers proud of the comments feature? Do they even know about it?
• Do millions of pages of hate speech make Yahoo a better company and the world a better place?
• Wouldn’t it feel awesome to be the person who solves this problem?

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Today, however, I’m feeling mostly recovered. I planned to spend the full day for a long bike ride. Unfortunately, once I woke up, I couldn’t muster the motivation to spend a full day outside in this heat. (It hit 98 today in Central Park.) Instead I rode a loop out to Coney Island and back.

On today’s bike ride, I used a free mobile application called InstaMapper to track my route on a map. I’ve tried InstaMapper before with limited success; the GPS on my Blackberry isn’t always reliable, and the program itself seemed to shut itself down randomly. Today, however, it worked brilliantly. Assuming it’s all still working, you can see an interactive map below showing my ride with pretty good precision. I find this kind of thing amazing.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

I mean, what is that? A shot of the old Pier 1 warehouses seen from Manhattan? Or Omaha, Nebraska, on a hazy afternoon?

It’s not like we have a shortage of icons. A rooftop water tower. A slice of pizza. The F train climbing the Culver Viaduct. The Williamsburgh Savings Bank Building clock tower. The Parachute Jump. The Cyclone. And isn’t there a bridge in Brooklyn that people might recognize?

Come on, Facebook. The 2.5 million residents of Kings County deserve better.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

A couple of months ago, I noticed a curious phrase showing up on lots of blogs.

“You should follow me on Twitter here.”

This phrase stands out for being terse, awkward, even rude. Most people would write “Please…” instead of “You should…” Yet this specific line of clunky self-promo copy spread like the flu. A Google search for that exact phrase returns 154,000 results! (For comparison, a search for “Please follow me on Twitter here” returns 1,690 results.)

We can trace this phenomenon to blogger Dustin Curtis, who used testing to find the optimal way to convince people to follow him on Twitter. “You should follow me on Twitter here” was proven to be the most persuasive sentence. You should read about his experiment here.

I have conflicted feelings about this. On one hand, I don’t want to endorse shoddy writing edited by machines. On the other hand, shouldn’t you use every weapon in your arsenal to make your writing more effective? You should!

I decided to try a test of my own. For the last six weeks, visitors to this blog have been part of an experiment.

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On my home page and at the top of this blog, I’ve been running a link asking people to give money to a charity bike ride I’m doing this Saturday and Sunday. I wrote a simple program that randomly shows one of a series of pre-programmed messages, then records how many times each message was displayed, and how many times people followed the link from that message. I use that data to calculate the percentage of clicks each link got. Then I compared the click-through rate of each phrase against other phrases that ran at the same time.

Turns out Dustin Curtis was right. Adding “You should” to the front of a sentence significantly increases the number of people who click on a link. So does adding “You can.” Longer sentences produce better results. Adding a user benefit helps. Including a dollar value helps sometimes, but not always—I tried $5, $10, $25, but only $25 had an impact.

The results of my test follow.

But first a few notes: This was more for fun than for science. Because my site gets relatively little traffic, it would have been a stronger test if I had chosen fewer phrases or let each test run for more time. Additionally, a lot of my traffic comes from spiders for search engines; my simple program counted them as visitors. I figured spiders behave in predictable ways and were unlikely to skew the results of the test, but counting them may have contributed to higher- or lower-than-normal click-through rates. There was also a significant swing in the number of total clicks from week to week, perhaps due to the behavior of spiders.

* * *

* * *

Summary: “You can help fight MS with a $25 gift to my Bike MS ride” was the most powerful phrase of the bunch. However, the real point is not whether it motivated people to click, but whether it motivated people to give. Sadly, it did not. During the time I ran this test I received 14 donations. (P.S.: Thank you!) I am fairly sure sure all of the people who gave found out about my bike ride from e-mail or Facebook postings, not from this web site. You could argue that some might have seen this message here as well, and that reinforced their behavior. But still: Nobody followed a link and then decided to give.

But that can change right now! You can help fight MS with a $25 gift to my Bike MS ride.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

How quickly things change. Remember when we used to wait to tape songs off the radio? Today we can find almost any piece of media we’re looking for with a few taps on a screen.

When we can’t find something, we actually get frustrated. Recently I read a book called Where The Suckers Moon about the history and impact of advertising, as told through the story of Subaru’s ill-fated 1991 ad campaign. Later I went online looking for samples of the 1991 Subaru commercials mentioned in the book. They’re nowhere! How exasperating!

With this impatience, we anticipate instant progress. This week I read a Bloomberg News story titled, “Time Warner Supports U.S. Postal Service Elimination of Saturday Delivery“. I thought to myself: “Quaint!” Magazine publishers and the Post Office are both collapsing. Surely within 10 years paper distribution of magazines by mail will be a mute point.

Our calls for instant progress are unrealistic. Then I remembered a scene from Where The Suckers Moon in which the ad writers predict the demise of car dealers within 10 years. Dealerships are inefficient, unnecessary and old-fashioned, they reason. Customers would rather order cars and have them delivered, and factories would rather sell right to customers. Didn’t happen. Today, the Internet enables custom ordering and delivery of many products, but not cars. The car dealer system is too deeply entrenched. The same may be true of Time Inc. magazines, the U.S. Postal Service, and the massive and diverse business infrastructure intertwined with their interests. Maybe we’ll be reading paper copies of magazines in 2110.

But we need to demand progress anyway. Nobody ever solved a problem by sitting around waiting for things to happen, or predicting that everything new would fail. Impatience can bypass realistic (and low) expectations. Impatience can invent new systems on the fly that are often stronger and nimbler than if they’d been carefully planned. We need to be impatient. Impatience is good.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

This is a time of fear, promise, and fidgety energy. Everyone who does what I do (marketing copywriting) is swimming in all of that as we adapt to social media.

The biggest challenge? Getting good information. Pragmatically, I need to connect with real people, not shout to a room of empty chairs or dumb robots. How do I figure out what to do?

For starters, by listening to social media experts. But here we have a big problem. Everyone with expertise in social media is also invested in it. If you’re in the business of promoting Google Buzz consultancy services, of course you’re going to rave about the tremendous potential of Google Buzz. When you’re talking about Twitter on Twitter, volume and repetition are as good as authority. And in this climate (here’s where the fear factor comes into play), any experts who betray a hint of skepticism are swiftly marginalized by their fellow social media leaders.

Those of us surveying this scene from a distance—ie., who embrace social media but don’t list it as a skill on our LinkedIn profiles—sometimes want to throw our hands up in frustration. Since I can’t count on self-styled social media experts for independent advice, I have to do research on my own. My counterparts in marketing departments everywhere are doing the same.

I’m convinced social media has armed us with amazing, powerful new tools, especially Twitter and Facebook. But I have questions I can’t answer. Here are four of them.

• Can social media “influencers” actually influence off-line behavior?
  Or: Why did “Kick Ass” flop at the box office?
• Is social media secure enough?
  Or: Should we be more concerned about the privacy of our customer communications—for our sake, and for the sake of our customers?
• Is social media popularity the result of quality and good work, or is it rigged and arbitrary?
  Or: Why is Justin Beiber better at engaging people on Twitter than every other human?
• Do social media ethics exist?
  Or: If Zynga gets away with something, does that make it OK?

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

First, I suggested he use the phrase “location-based social networking” at every opportunity. And second, I recommended he read two articles. Here are links to the two articles and why I recommended each one.

The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model, By Daniel Roth

This WIRED story from last fall is a good overview of Demand Media, a company that’s taking the traffic=money business model to its logical extreme. Demand uses an algorithm to generate headlines designed to pull in the best possible combination of ad revenue and search engine traffic. Once the headlines are chosen, Demand’s editors hire a stable of low-paid freelancers write the articles. Some of the articles are useful, many are train wrecks. (“How to Buy Stocks” is a classic.) But they’re all meant to sell. If you are a newspaper—ie., your business depends on attracting as many readers as possible to displaying relevant ads to them—Demand Media and its ilk (Seed, Associated Content) are your competition. And they could crush you.

5 Easy Steps to Creating Reusable Social Content, By Jay Baer on Social Media Examiner

There are many social media blogs with posts similar to this one, but I singled out this article as a typical study of the 2010 social media ecosystem. The writer offers advice on how to make your content sing on multiple platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, blogs and e-mail blasts. One of his tips is, “Remember, one of your most important customers is Google.” Fine. But at no point does this blogger allude to any actual, living, breathing human customer. Have we lost our way this badly?

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Conventional wisdom on the Internet is that story performance can be engineered through science. Experienced writers know it takes more than this. We know how to listen, process and communicate information for an audience. We understand how readers respond to surprises and quirks and little nudges that encourage them to stay with whatever it is we’re giving them. We know how to write with compassion and empathy about sensitive subjects. We know when it’s best to write nothing.

Fortunately, the statistical stuff can be learned. It’s up to every writer who wants to work to learn it. We need to learn how to code, and how to make data work for us. We don’t take our marching orders from robots, but we also don’t sit around complaining that the Internet offers no way to distinguish quality from crap. Either you take control of this mess, or somebody else does.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Here’s what my site looked like in August 1997.

And here’s my site in August 1998.

(I’m posting these pages with very few modifications. I changed a little bit of header and footer code, and I only posted the home pages, not the funny/pointless side projects they linked to.)

An interesting thing happened between 1997 and 1998. My site in 1997, like most personal web sites, was just a long lists of links. The message was: “Here’s my name and how to reach me, and a bunch of stuff on the ‘net I’m interested in.” It was kind of like the earliest Friendster and Facebook pages; people defined themselves by what they liked (movies, books, music), not what they were doing.

But around 1998, I began publishing short journal entries and I redesigned my page to look like a newspaper. My 1998 site had a date at the top and some writing below it, but you wouldn’t have called it a blog, since that word wasn’t coined until 1999. I still have copies of all the posts I wrote in 1998, and they’re awful, but it was a start.

In the 12 years since, a LOT has changed about how the Internet works.

My 1997 and 1998 sites were HTML files (basically a text file) that referenced a few small images. Most people were on dial-up; I was lucky to have broadband access at a university campus. In running my site, the only third-party service I depended on was a now-defunct company called Beseen, which offered a free, rudimentary message board service.

Today when you visit daryllang.com, a lot more wheels are spinning. My server executes a few lines of PHP code, calling information from a database and plugging it into an HTML template. A separate style sheet tells your browser which fonts and colors to use. Free services from Google, Twitter, WordPress, and Adobe (Flash, for YouTube videos) are all involved in making this page work.

I’ve designed my site to load even of one or all of these free services fails. (My Twitter feed still displaces on my home page, for example, even if Twitter goes totally offline.) If you look at a lot of blogs today, you’ll see them accessing many different free services to offer basic functions. It’s also amazing how much commerce depends on Google tools like Google Maps and GMail being always on.

Is this a problem?

Let’s go back and look at the links on my 1997 page. You’ll see defunct sites like Audionet, Infoseek, AltaVista, Four11, Geocities and AOL Hometown. Remember them?

Back then, web services were light, cheap and disposable, like simple documents you might care about, or might not. The ever-present “under construction” graphics often signified: “I started this site but got bored. Make of it what you will.” And after the dot-com crash, a lot of useful free stuff just came undone.

So the question is: Is there any good reason we should place more trust now in the free web than we did in 1998? Is the fact that free web services are more important enough to ensure they’re more stable? Put another way: Are you feeling lucky?

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Here’s one of the greatest success stories in technology: The HP 12C financial calculator. It was introduced in 1981 and is still selling. After a generation of seismic advancements in technology, this weird horizontal calculator has kept its edge. It costs $70 and people still buy it.

Name something else battery-powered that hasn’t changed since 1981. I’ve got nothing. Blackberries and iPhones seldom last two years before better ones come out, yet this calculator could bury us all. Now I don’t work in finance and I’m far from an expert in calculators, so I can’t explain in detail what’s so amazing about this device. But I know calculators are a competitive space. This one’s success can’t just be an accident of history or the result of marketing. It’s adoption isn’t a requirement; surely there are other calculators that fit with today’s business conventions.

It could only have survived this long by being good. Good enough to be deeply loved by exactly the right customers. The HP 12C designers nailed it. They achieved something unheard of in technology: perfection. If we’re lucky, once in our lifetimes we’ll work on a team that does that.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

I’m beginning to wonder how many of the words I see every day are written by robots.

• There’s stuff like Demand Media’s eHow, where articles are carefully engineered to produce as much incoming search engine traffic as possible for as little expense as possible. It’s about serving customer needs, kind of, but only in so far as a customer is a disembodied server request generated by Google’s software.
• Facebook ads target us based on demographics, preferences and keywords. These ads make sense in theory, but in practice seem oddly tone-deaf and unambitious, as if they were written by interns, or maybe children. Or algorithms.
• Twitter is overrun by robots programmed to follow and unfollow people and retweet posts based on predictable user behaviors. It’s so easy to do you wouldn’t believe it.
• Online display advertising is falling victim to oversupply and automation — a combination that’s driving prices down so fast that even a Huffington Post exec was quoted on the record sounding scared.
• Blogging has evolved from a fun hobby into a precise science of writing lists optimized for search engines and social media propagation—a.k.a. linkbait. Old-fashioned notions of quality and clarity of writing, design craftsmanship, and copyright ownership have been squeezed out of the equation as too inefficient.

If Internet media is a pure democracy, it follows that content creators must be evaluated by output volume and popularity. If you’re a writer, artist, musician, or filmmaker, this might sound like a dystopian nightmare. I am here to tell you: Do not despair.

We are at a weird hiccup in the history of communication where we have sophisticated media culture colliding with an Internet culture still relying on primitive ways to measure performance. Of what significance are impressions when any computer whiz can program a bot that creates an infinite number of them?

This is all going to come into clearer focus in the next few years as consumers decide how they’re going to view, read and interact with content using handheld devices and cloud computing. At the same time, companies will develop better methods to measure what influences customers’ online spending behavior (which will, inevitably, have to pay for this all).

I’ll probably be returning to this theme more often on this blog. How do we actually build useful stuff on the Internet, stuff we’re proud of, instead of churning out noise? How can we get behind stuff that’s honestly good and resist gaming the numbers, yet still keep a competitive edge?

More urgently: How do we keep the greatest information network ever designed from being overtaken by blabbering robots?

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.