Author Archives: admin

Worst website ever

Zzzphone.com. Excessive use of flash. Unsolicited, over-compressed, auto-starting audio (on the specs page; there’s no surer way to get users to leave a site and never come back than automatically assaulting them with unexpected audio when the page loads). Random fonts and sizes, and graphics containing text. Best part: click on the shopping cart link at the bottom of the page (obviously without ordering anything first), and this comes up:

Step 3 of 6? Am I allowed to skip steps like that? Buy another nothing? Can I get a discount on that? (via Max.)

Oh, and in case anyone out there needed reminding that you can design complex, interactive, highly graphical sites in HTML without Flash, check out Shiftn’s Obesity System Influence Diagram.

Bad journalism

Consider the following two quotes from this BusinessWeek article by Susan Berfield. From the first paragraph:

He has Asperger’s syndrome,

On the second page:

Cohen never sought a formal diagnosis

If it’s not clear why this is bad journalism, replace “Asperger’s” with schizophrenia, or Bipolar disorder or with any other psychological or even any physical condition. How can the author of a story about a person living with something like Asperger’s, where the journalist admits that that person has never been diagnosed, be trusted? What other key details in this story come from single sources and make it into print unchallenged and unverified? How many other stories in BusinessWeek suffer from the same sloppy reporting?

When I worked on the bi-weekly underground student newspaper at UC Santa Cruz, our editors and faculty advisors in the journalism department would have flayed us alive for committing such an oversight.

Full disclosure: I also used to work for Bram at BitTorrent, but, unlike Susan Berfield and the BusinessWeek editors, I don’t consider myself qualified to comment on any medical diagnoses.