More please…little more…that’s good…thank you

I’ve been itching to write more here, but have been stalling for long enough. Here I am on my third posting, very tempted to steer off topic, deviate from the site’s mission, but I promise I will stay the course.

A co-worker pointed out bbc.co.uk to me yesterday. In the header there is a call-out to customize your homepage. The copy is perfect; they’re calling it my home page, when it’s not (yet), and they’re giving me the opportunity to customize it. So, I figure, well, I guess I should customize my home page. I can even set my location (why not? I am on a .co.uk site and would therefore would like them to know what’s up and that I’m clearly representing the states). The level of customization is similar to that of iGoogle (the customized Google homepage – where you can have the Google search field sit atop all sorts of useful daily tips, advice, horoscopes, art, words, news, you name it); and of course since it’s Google, it’s great. While similar to iGoogle, bbc.co.uk’s customization is a little bit more clever.

So I checked off Blogs, Business and Money, (checked and then unchecked Entertainment), History, News, Sport, World Service (no idea what this is). I also chose a page “colour” – a nice purple hue. I clicked save and all my different modules populated with content. Then, within each module, I was afforded the opportunity to further customize what kind of content I would like to see. For Sports – Football, golf, Olympics and Boxing. I clicked save and then, within my sports module, I get subcategories, per sport.

At this point, there is one additional feature, level of customization that pushes this site to a level of functionality I’ve always looked for: within each sport’s sub-category – I can control the number of headline links that appear. If I want to see the top 10 most recent headlines on golf, I just keep clicking the + button. If 10 is too many, or it’s pushing other content that is important to me too far down the page, I can click the – button and reduce the total number of golf news headlines.

I’ve always wanted to see this type of customization for news headline modules, often wondering what additional stories made the headline for this section that I might have previously missed.

This level of customization is the web equivalent to the parmesan girl (it’s always a girl) coming around your shoulder with a great hot bowl of pasta in front of you and ever so pleasantly adding cheese to your glowing dish of pasta. The only difference is, too much cheese and you’re doomed, too many headlines on Tiger and you’re a click away from resolving the problem. The other difference of course is that computers are not edible.

Hasta pasta-

Arashional