Better news service.

I just got a CNN Breaking News email. The subject of the breaking news really doesn't matter, but it brought to mind some ideas. Some years ago, during some political something or other, I signed up with CNN to get their Breaking News email updates. They come in this nice little string of text with just enough information to let you know what is going on. I have learned that a Breaking News email update usually means that they now have a great article on their site for me to read if I want to know more. Most of the time, if it interests me, I want to know more.

If you are not familiar with their Breaking News emails, you might guess that it would include a nice little link to the related article or maybe a stub or topic page that links to all the related articles if it is an ongoing story.

Nope. Nada.

They have an unsubscribe link. They have links from the ads that they stick in them. But nothing to get me to their site so they can do their job of getting me to read more of their content. Come on people, my kid could program that. The whole concept of hyperlinks in emails is almost as old as the web. This should have happened 15 years ago. Think of the change to readership and the bottom line in terms of ad revenue.

I should probably thank them, though. If I clicked off to CNN every time I got an interesting Breaking News update, I would probably spend a lot more time on their site, and consequently, less time actually trying to be productive. That brings me to another point. More than half of the Breaking News updates I get, I don't care about. For some, yeah, I am sure they are interested, but different people have different interests.

Let me pick my interests. Please. I don't care about sports, or entertainment, and there are only a few sub topics that interest me in travel, health, and living. Come to think of it, I really don't care about most of criminal proceedings under the justice section either. Constitutional law, business law, and patent law, yes, but the rest of the stuff, just let me opt out of it.

Make a general list of subject tags, arranged categorically, and let me pick whole sections, sub-sections, or even individual subject tags, and only send me the links on those. If you did, I can promise I will click the link much more often. Yeah, that link that doesn't exist yet. I figure, if you can tailor my content to me, you certainly can make it easier for me to get to.