Posting
Just last night I was reminiscing through Winston’s article on the history of FunkyKit (previously AMD3D and CPU3D), that I realized how much change there has been on how online articles are now structured and presented to readers. Just a decade and a half ago there were much less news around, with less companies, less startups, and product launches were never as big an event as they are now, we would struggle to post up more than a few articles or news per day. Nowadays, for the tech-minded, we have a new product released nearly every day from large established companies such as Asus or Facebook, to much smaller kickerstarters and/or upcoming companies in India or China.
With the use of Wayback Machine, we can look back and see that AMD3D we can see that each post was just a paragraph or so long. This short article length and the use of minimal small images (what we now regard as thumbnails) to showcase the products was all down to both the bandwidth for servers costing an arm and a leg back then, and end readers were still stuck on low internet connections, with the widespread use of broadband connections following a few years after. I can remember once I posted a graphics card review and forgot about resizing the images and used full-blown ones. That resulted in exceeding the server bandwidth package we had paid for in a matter of hours after the review went live, and for those that did see the review before it got edited, it took them at least 10 minutes before the review fully loaded for them, thats if their connection didn’t time out.
It wasn’t just the speed of the internet that was factored in deciding on how much information was posted per articles. Readers now are more hungry for additional information than before; now comparisons needed to be made, pros and cons, company background, company forecasts, etc all have to be included to grab hold of, and keep, the reader’s attention. I have to admit, back then I was just mindlessly reposting news from other sites, but now the vast majority of the time needed just to repost news is used up in researching the product, company brand and competitors, so that the readers receives more context. To put it simply, back then we only talked about ‘What’ was being released. Now we have to go into a bit of the background in ‘How’ it can be done, and ‘Why’ it needs to be done.
