The Friday Fillip

Condé Nast publishes magazines that cater to those with money — Vogue, Vanity Fair, Gourmet, and perhaps thirty others (including the New Yorker and Wired, by the way). Which in turn means that they earn a fair bit of change themselves; and one advantage to that, for us their readers, at least, is that they have the means to make interesting websites. The one that caught my eye recently is Portfolio.com, and particularly the part with interactive features.

Interactivity is where the web really shines. Computers are too smart to spend all of their time reproducing the various combinations of 26 letters (an astronomical number, admittedly) or even the megapixels involved in photos. They have the ability to let you play games with them. Now, Portfolio’s interactive features aren’t as sophisticated as games by any stretch, but they’re attractive and engaging in a way that purely static presentations are not.

For example, Portfolio has a story on Dov Charney, the Canadian who moved to the U.S. and started the American Apparel chain. The focus of the story is on his current legal difficulties, but the associated interactive feature explores an aspect of his business — the making of T-shirts — and how it has become outsourced to other countries.

Want to know how much Tina Fey is worth? Check out the interactive feature and wish you looked more like Sarah Palin. Or, more earnest, see where America’s as-yet-undestroyed stockpiles of chemical weapons are and how much it will cost to get rid of them.

Interactivity — even simple audio and video — is something that the vast majority of law sites haven’t come to terms with yet, tending to regard anything more elaborate than Times New Roman as frippery or lèse majesté. But it’s fun to think of what we might do in this regard. CanLII interactive! Can you see it?