Why P-I?

Seattlest is a SeattlePI.com power user (so you don't have to be) so we get real excited about new website functionality over there. Yesterday the P-I launched something new with the unfortunate "my" prefix (which does immediately let you know exactly what it is, but is tired nonetheless). Ok, you've been a web user for some time now. We're assuming you're pretty savvy or you wouldn't be here and you can probably guess what "My-PI" does without any training wheels from Seattlest, but that's not going to stop us from rambling on for another couple hundred words.

We were excited to see this new feature because we love the P-I but we have a problem finding some things on the site. A daily keyword search isn't the answer because we can't know what we're looking for beforehand. It's news. And they tend to slip things into random sections that we generally don't feel are worthwhile and thus don't monitor. How are we to find gems like this? (Somehow we did.)

My-PI is a giant block of website real estate off to the right that lets you customize P-I content. To an extent. It's not really all that customizable. You can add boxes to it from any of the paper's sections, columnists, blogs, etc. More notable is what you can't do. You can't determine how many items are shown per box. You can't create boxes based on keyword searches and you can't get it to display any P-I photographs. Haven't those things been standard "my" functionality for five years or so?

My-PI does give you easy buttons for emailing content or subscribing to RSS feeds, but once you've subscribed to all the P-I feeds that you're interested in why would you still need My-PI? Seattlest pulls a lot of RSS from the P-I. We click through to a lot of articles and we spend some time navigating the site as well. We'd hazzard a guess that there are few people out there that spend as much time with P-I content online as Seattlest, and we just don't see what My-PI is going to do for us. Ok, we're not the average user. We're sure a lot of people would like to have a toolbar of customized P-I articles up in their browser, but in order to see it you have to already be on the site. You can't replace the P-I's left navigation bar with My-PI, so what's the point? You've got links on the left arranged in the way that the P-I's extensive usability research (hopefully) has shown is most effective and then you have links on the right arranged in a way that you thought would be a good idea the first time you blew through. Which do you think you're going to use more often? We populated ours with a few areas that we like to go to that aren't that easy to get at via the P-I's navigation. We slashed all the defaults except for "Most Read" and the added "Local News, "Environment," Todd Bishop's Microsoft stuff, Buzzworthy...and then we kind of ran out of must reads and threw a few random things in there. Again, we're already subscribed to all of those feeds and we're not likely to miss anything we think is important. Seattlest has had access to the real My-PI for months - It's called Bloglines.

My-PI with its current functionality isn't going to help us find the things we're looking for from the Post Intelligencer. It may be usefull for some people, but we predict we'll ignore it for a few weeks and then finally disable it. We'll let you know if we're wrong.

(And we can't say "RSS" this many times in a post and not remind you to subscribe to Seattlest.)