ndmckinney|net

I opened my browser today to get a check of the headlines from the Washington Post, using their “mywashingtonpost.com” custom portal. I was quite disappointed at the message I received today:

Thank you for being a loyal reader of washingtonpost.com and a user of our customized mywashingtonpost.com page. Over the years, washingtonpost.com has developed new technology and methods to customize the delivery of our news, features, multimedia and more. As a result, we will be discontinuing mywashingtonpost.com as of February 23, 2009.

[Links omitted]

Thank you for your understanding as we offer more ways to get you the washingtonpost.com content you want quickly and easily.

Sincerely,

David Heyman
Director, Customer Care

Anyone who had accessed the site in the last several months would have guessed this was coming. The articles on the site were often stale or out of date. The weather widget never reported accurate information. In fact, the site never really developed after its initial launch. The feature I enjoyed most was that mywashingtonpost.com allowed me to strip down the sections to what I wanted most: international, metro, politics, and technology.

As newspapers have struggled to cope with the new era of instant information, a number of different models have come and gone. The NY Times, for example, tried to charge a subscription fee to accesses much of the site’s content. This model, of course, doesn’t work with casual observers, but it was worth a try.

There is a real danger, in my opinion, of the WP’s lack of innovation will only hurt its position on the internet. As news aggregator sites and other third-party sites continue to pull headlines, the relevancy of visiting the WP’s site is becoming more and more diminished.

I will, however, miss mywashingtonpost.com. In fact, I’m not sure how I’ll access the Post’s information in the future. While I have a number of RSS feeds in my aggregator already. I deplore the main page layout — it’s too overrun with adverts, cluttered and poorly organized, and focuses too much on “fluff.” I especially hate the WP’s overuse of poorly written, browser slowing javascript. And don’t get me started on “autorefresh.”

Of course, I may just be complaining unnecessarily. I haven’t spent much time on the WP’s main page. I could very well adapt to using the site in this way, or give the RSS another try, or some combination of the two.

A painfully funny commentary about McCain supporters.

In today’s Washington Post, George Will has an article that chronicles the Dust Bowl. The story is in the context of “warnings of environmental apocalypse” and serves as an illustration of a real one; the problem is, the dust seems to have settle in Will’s head.

There is something of a logical disconnect between the entirety of Will’s article and the very last sentence.

The earth turned out to be more durable, and the people who wrested their livings from it more resilient, than had been thought.

This sentence poses two problems. Firstly, it downplays the true hardships that Will himself purported to chronicle. Secondly, it reaches a conclusion that an “environmental apocalypse” is really more of a mild inconvenience. John Steinbeck’s masterpiece Grapes of Wrath seems to reach the opposite conclusion as Will.

Arguably, the damage from the Dust Bowl can still be seen. While there aren’t clouds of dust reaching towards the stratosphere anymore, the fertile prairie land has not recovered. Many farm communities in the plains are just as impoverished today as they were during the Dust Bowl, and survival exists only through a series of government subsidies and a bit of luck. A new environmental apocalypse, with effects that will reach far beyond those seen in the 1930′s, could not only bring about a new Dust Bowl, but could have a more permanent impact on the American landscape.

Mr. Will, this is not something that will just “blow over”.