“The Drudge Report usually leads with a “font size=+7” ALL CAPS headline in Arial. Sometimes it’s italicized. Sometimes, for something big big, he’ll cap it off with the infamous siren.

[snip]

Stories aren’t grouped or organized except probably more interesting ones up top. And that’s it. Your eye darts all over the place looking around for something that looks interesting. The design encourages wandering and random discovery.

The site feels like a chaotic newsroom with the cutting room floor exposed. I think that’s part of the excitement — and good design.”

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Drudge, today:

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While I’ve never been an obsessive Drudge refresher, I do see the appeal.  I’ve been spending a bit more time with the Huffington Post lately, and it’s hard not to notice the parallels on some days, especially as big election news flowed into the top third of the site, when giant headlines were followed up by a very Drudge-esque big block of text full of links to related stories.

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HuffPo, today:

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Of course, HuffPo has all that dang navigation at the top.

Does anyone use it?  Starting to wonder…

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It’s not terribly social. It’s not much of a network.

In fact, it’s so devoid of features, there’s little to distract you from listening to music, which is what you showed up to do.

The front page of the site is dead simple: A colorful list of mixtapes to listen to, with relatively opaque usernames that offer only hints of what might be behind the link.

So, at the start, if no one sent you a link to a particular mix, you’re just free to browse the tapes, listen to anything you want, find one with a familiar band’s name in it somewhere, and you’re off.

Talk about serendipity.

So, because I’m obsessed with thinking about how to present “news” online in unconventional ways that might hold a reader’s interest a little bit longer and keep them around your site long enough to find that enterprise/investigative/database piece you worked so hard at, it occurs to me that this could work for a news site.

Yeah, a news site.  What did you think I was going to say?

So, instead of the recommendation-engine driven approach of a Digg or an Amazon or Netflix, or even network-based link firehoses like Delicious, Facebook, or Twitter, this would take a purely serendipitous approach:

A user shows up, adds 10 links to a mix, gives it a clever name, and moves on.  No bulky profiles, no following, no activity feeds; just 10 good stories, as if they were a mixtape.

Sounds like a serious timesink to me…

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