We Don't Need No Steenkin' Badjess
What started out as a nice way to distinguish the good from the bad -- InfiNet's "Cool Site of the Day" -- has turned into an ugly badge-fest, littering the Web with awards no one has heard of, with invisible judging criteria: hot site of the day, MSN Pick of the Day, Magellan 3-Star Pick, worst of the Web, Riddler's pick, most photogenic site, most likely to be disconnected, et al. Some pages fill half their site with award badges, which also link back to the award giver's site. There's the rub. These so-called "awards" are the biggest scam for free advertising ever invented. "Hey we've given you this award, so display this badge so people can link to our page." Since online advertising is nothing more than a link to another page, this is basically a free ad. Exhibit A: Point's "Top 5% of the Web" badge. If every other page has this award, shouldn't this be "Top 50% of the Web"? And where does anyone get the gumption to say they know how many pages exist? Certainly no one at Point can quantify that exactly, so where do they get 5%? The badge should read: "A Heavily Trafficked Site That We'd Like to Divert to Point." It's gotten so that everyday people, like one of the staffers at 3MR (who doesn't even have a Web site!), gets an email message from someone saying:
The readers of SFBUZZ have selected your site for it's [sic] weekend browser award. SFBUZZ has been on the Web since August 1995, and is a general interest magazine published in San Francisco, CA, in both print and web format.
If you would like to include the symbol of the award on your site, here it is:
Thank you for creating a site that keeps us all browsing!
End quote. Gag me with a badge.
Alta Vista Celebrity Name Search-Off, Round 1 (cont.)
Uta Pippig vs. Adam Curry
As explained in last week's Madonna conquest, the Alta Vista Celeb Search-Off is our way to crown the most popular person on the Web. This week, the challenger has won three straight Boston Marathons, she hails from Germany, and is not, repeat, NOT, a mutant version of Scottie Pippen and Babe. She's Uta Pippig. And in this corner, he's a heartthrob whose tossled hair extensions waved in the wind between MTV videos. Now he's a serious NetGuy with his own online company, who ends email messages with this quirky line: "I had to quit my job to have time to read my email." It's Adam Curry.
The Alta Vista Tally:
Uta Pippig: 200 matches
representative site: "Die MarathonlŠuferin zog nach Amerika":
http://www.astro.unibas.ch/~matthias/uta.html
Adam Curry: 3,000 matches
representative site: "Adam Curry Seeks Punitive Damages"
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~mrl6a/stupidity/AdamLitigation.txt
Repeat after me: "Uta, Uta, Uta...[shake head despondently]...Pippig, Pippig, Pippig...[clean spittle off your monitor]"
"3-Minute Roast" is a weekly, advertisement-free, opinionated rip on anything that strikes our fancy in the online world.
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