Slashdot Mirror

since everyone bitches about how they have no content, let's see how many present their content, or rather: how many are black text on white background...

EVIL

* underlined+bold
* drop shadow
* cream background, not much of an improvement. some of the header text is glossy (shiney / embossed / see above one / other various "auto-artistic" trash ).
* the tiny images illustrating each entry, are dithered (i guess with a "web palette" [making it look even more horrible], which people stopped doing 5+ years ago) then jpg'd.
* cyan background (the name of 100% green + 100% blue)
* purple text, orange links. no, that's not better.
* yes i really want to be tortured with your family album pics
* half of the people leave directly (or die) with the header
* light yellow (piss-water yellow?) background.
* "I.Mter-
views" ?
i don't get it. dashes in headlines are satan.
* scary vector portrait
* horrible. evil. tasteless.
* scarier than the sixapart girl.
* yellow background.

GOOD

* pear/white background. title with first letter biggie, first line in different font from rest.
* greenish tasty tone over everything ...which i didn't follow. great. thanks. as for the equally bad link-colours being that horrible default-blue/purple, it was only around 10%. this was checking 70% of the a-list. methinks those popular people should hire someone to design their site

good design = pyros, don't remember any other. and yeah, it's not a blog.
says intersting things = ms g33k. who i'm not sure is a good thing to link, i won't link myself.

Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts.

Yo is sure to get schooled from my mad skillz. Oh by the way, this 3l33t haxor had oatmeal for breakfast this morning. Oh and here's a picture of my cat.

It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs.

On one level, blogs are intended for brief communications or thoughts that often revolve around a central theme, but not always. Often they are intended as a means for maintaining communication with family and friends or as a creative outlet. However, this guy has obviously not been very informed or is lazy about finding informative/interesting blogs out there like:

Kevin Sites whose reporting pioneered the use of the blog in combat reporting.

Dan Gillmor whose new efforts are targeted at grassroots journalism from sources exactly like blogs.

Or Chris Anderson's blog The Long Tail which discusses businesses, economic, cultural and political models whose goals are to take advantage of the significant portion of those populations underlying the distal distributions of a curve.

And many others whose careful investigation, research, thought and reporting go into the content on their blogs.

Oh, and then there are the blogs like mine........

I should also have included some relevant links to Internet based news sources bookmarked in Safari:

Slashdot of course.
CNN of course.
NYTimes for the writing and quality of reporting.
BBC for the big mainstream non American news perspective.
Kevin Sites for on the ground reporting in Iraq.
Dan Gillmor for news grassroots news.
CBS for financial info.
CNET for tech news.
Global Security for political defense news.
Google for a good news accumulator.
Cryptome because John manages to pull some pretty damned interesting articles out.
NPR of course. Don't forget to donate.
Reuters because they have the news.
Washington Post for beltway news.
Wall St. Journal for more financial news.
NPR Marketplace for more financial news.
CBS for mainstream US news.
Technocrat for real science oriented geek news, like Slashdot only with less noise.
Oh, yeah and
Macsurfer for a Macintosh community oriented news accumulator.

Indeed. Remember the big news of a US marine shooting an Iraqi POW? That was broken primarily by MSM, yes. But for the full story (or at least a fuller story), you might want to read the photojournalist's account.

Indeed. Remember the big news of a US marine shooting an Iraqi POW? That was broken primarily by MSM, yes. But for the full story (or at least a fuller story), you might want to read the photojournalist's account.

The most important blog this year, bar none, was http://www.kevinsites.net/. You can't top it.

Living under the anti-science, anti-reason, faith-based regime of a hyprocritical, warmongering, theocratic jerk puts me in a bad mood, I guess.

Or for another example, Kevin Sites may be reporting for NBC, but also has his own unaffiliated blog.

The New York Times is better than Kevin Sites, no matter how many G.I.s he blows for the story.

Other than typical news sites...

-- Debka (Middle East News)
-- Official Iraqi News
-- Where is Read? - Iraqi Blog
-- Kuwait Blog
-- Back to Iraq Blog
-- Iraq today
-- Warblogs.cc
-- Kevin Sites
-- Sky.com
-- BCC News Live Feed
-- Agonist

CBSnews also has a beautiful high detail webcam without all the crap on the bottom of the screen.
God bless our soldiers.

Davak