No Tran, a junior in journalism and electronic media, said he relied on MSNBC.com as the only source of his daily news over all other professional news Web sites.
"MSNBC has very attractive graphics and a very nice simple three-column layout," Tran said. "If you hover your mouse cursor over a menu link, a whole new set of submenu pops up with all the latest headlines."
Tran noticed the MSNBC homepage automatically refresh itself about every five minutes with new updates.
Tran mentioned the homepage also did a great job of categorizing links of photos, stories, and videos. For example, Tran liked the left navigational menu because it was convenient to move around the Web site.
"The only thing I didn't like about MSNBC is that it didn't have much of list links and inline links in their stories," Tran said. "But their stories are accurate, complete, efficient, and precise."
Jim Stovall, professor of 422, said, "An inline link takes the words in a story and makes them into a link. Inline links offer us readers of the story to get additional information instantly."
A reader must register for a MSNBC account in order to get additional information, e-mail alerts, personalization of homepage, RSS feeds, or instant message a page.
Tran said, "MSNBC.com could offer a reader's service to post comments and uploads to social networking sites."
Comments
staci martin wolfe commented, on March 5, 2008 at 8:57 p.m.:
Tran, I applaud your use of video for the review of MSNBC.com. Very funny too.
You know, most traditional media sites avoid inline links. There are a couple of reasons (excuses?) for this:
1. They are afraid to link off their own site because they might lose their reader.
2. Links sometimes change, and the publisher doesn't have any control over what someone else does with their own web site. So if, for example, MSNBC.com linked to a story on my web site, and later I decided not to renew my domain name, and someone else buys it and puts up their content... well, the link MSNBC.com put in their story would no longer be accurate.
I think it's something that web savvy internet users understand, but it may take some time for the media to feel comfortable linking outside their domain.
Good job on your review.
Amanda Wills commented, on March 8, 2008 at 9:42 p.m.:
I just have to say that I am very impressed with this picture. Nice photography.