December 31st, 2002
Competition
#351
Randomness Considered Harmful
Sometimes I wonder why these guys are even at it. Where’s the creativity? Where’s the content? Where are they?
Mike’s site used to look like it had promise. Rating others’ websites — that was a novel idea. Problem is, he never updated it regularly, and he never met the timeframe for updates he published there. And then there’s that reduced links page on there. He’s shriveled that page to four banners, only two of which are actually linked.
And then there’s the unoriginality part. He just copy-pasted the fire idea from Bill.
Wait, everyone’s been doing that: copying from everyone else. Case in point: Josh is stealing everyone’s images. And so has Alex.
Refreshingly, Pat came up with some new ideas — long needed.
Visiting those links, have you also figured out that hardly anyone has an original title? (Well, some pride themselves on that fact.) Bill has Bill’s Web Site, Josh has Josh’s Site of Completely Random Stuff — Created by Josh (even though I urged him to call it JPen’s Random Stuff), Mike has Mie’s [sic] Site of Links, Alex has (gasp) Home Page of Me, and Pat has Pat’s Stuff. You’d think they’re all using some 3-step make-your-site-in-seconds service.
I’d have to commend the following for actually taking some time to think up titles, though: Brad, Scott, Wireless (also run by Mike), Jeremy, and Webber. But I do have to admit that Josh actually spent some time on his title — spent time making it as bland as possible — he even solicited comments about it at school!
I guess you want me to cut to the chase, huh? You see, in the old days, people set up websites because they actually had a good reason to. Maybe they wanted a website for their software. Maybe they needed a job and wanted to post a résumé on there. Maybe they were a real leftist and wanted to make a political point. Or maybe they had some family photos to share. But these guys, they just make a site for the sake of it. And since they can’t think of anything to put on it, they just play monkey-see-monkey-do and tout randomness or fire.
Wait! I’m not done yet. What’s with everyone being on GeoCities all of a sudden? It’s free? Well, so are Tripod, Angelfire, FortuneCity, Netscape MyWebpage, Netfirms, and Portland (!). And some of them are even bannerless, give you more webspace, have a short URL like myplace.a-good-host.com, and give you e–mail addresses. Still think you want GeoCities? Hmph.
(And I chose the title because of this, just out of perverseness. ☻)
12/31/2002 @ 10:24 PM
John Fogg
Well, it's fun to make websites, even if there's really no reason to do so. If you have nothing to say, people probably won't look at your website, and so that's that. There's no reason to rant about it; nothing bad ever came from making a pointless website, aside from wasting time. But if they don't update it regularly, it doesn't even seem like they're doing much of that; they can learn a bit of HTML. Ranting about it is not worth your time and energy.
– President Fogg
12/31/2002 @ 10:58 PM
Minh Nguyễn
Yes it is. After all, I garnered a comment. ☻
And what’s wrong with a little self-promotion? ☻