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CNET News.com Turns 7
dmehus writes "Just as Google celebrated its 5th birthday last week, which was covered by Slashdot, I thought it would be equally appropriate to point out that tech news darling CNET News.com celebrated its 7th birthday this past week. To mark that occasion, its Editor-in-Chief Jai Singh wrote an article, in which he reflects on their founding slogan of 'Tech News First' and their commitment to that going forward. He also announces a brand new redesign that was unveiled yesterday. To that I'd add, here's to another seven more! Thoughts or opinions, anyone?"
I've learned to take CNets news with a grain of salt, since many times they just seem to editorialize stories and add in useless comments etc.
To be in business 7 years is a great accomplishment though, and my congratulations go out to them.
They have com.com as a domain too... Reminds me of how I always wanted to buy dotcomat.com ..so my email address could be
dotcom@dotcomat.com..
They removed the investor end of the page it seems, making it seemingly unfriendly to the end user/viewer.
After pushing it for so long as a key component to thier "tech news" package, I wonder if its been thrown on the back burner, or if it was a mistake.
You can still get to it @ http://investor.news.com/
-mason.j
But I actually know how to write Valid XHTML strict, unlike the bozos at cnet.
Validation
It looks like ass in konqueror.
How old is news.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com?
As long as there are accurate and relevant reports from Gartner and Meta, I expect news.com to be there to publicize them so IT professionals can make informed buying decisions.
Wow, CSS, XHTML, and and lots of div tags. Doesn't validate, but they're better off than they used to be, at least they made an attempt I guess.
To bad they ruin it with static width pages. You'd think they'd know this after 7 years.
I mean seriously, most of their stuff are Windows-centric (or MS-centric, depending on how u see it). Don't take my word on it, just click any of their sections and you're guaranteed to see "Windows" or "Microsoft".
I personally stopped reading anything with a double dot com url. And I don't think I'm the only one.
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
I found CNET News.com to be rather biased towards Microsoft early on by running stories favorable towards the company. (often ignoring news critical of Microsoft) Given that they were really sorta a pop news internet publication (and still kinda are), I suppose that label would be appropriate. I assumed that Microsoft was underwriting them at the time. However, recently they appear to have moved more towards an unbiased coverage. They are still kinda superficial in their news coverage, but I have found the editorial changes and news changes in the last couple of years to be more palatable.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
In the spirit of promoting the Slashdot effect, I decided to visit cnet.com after having dismissed their site as rubbish. Well, as it turns out, I found an interesting article where an EFF attorny suggests that universities obfuscate student IP addresses by shuffling them to fend off the the RIAA. Any site that posts that sort of content is okay by me! So to you, cnet.com, may you grow in our dismal economy!
I used to frequent CNet every day back around 1999, and I found them to be a timely, valuable resource. But something happened in early 2001, and they began to go downhill rapidly. The site design became cluttered and severely commercialized, to the point where it became difficult to get a page to load properly - even over a DSL connection - because of all the junk slapped on it.
The sluggish performance and cluttered pages would be worth trudging through if there were some solid content behind them. Their hardware and software reviews were once top notch, but now I can find better elsewhere - Tom's Hardware, for example, or a slew of specialized sites (silentpcreview, for example, or mini-itx). Even the amateur reviews at Epinions or Amazon are more informative (taken in aggregate).
Frankly, I'm amazed CNet has lasted this long.
If you want to compare the new site design to the old one check out the archived copy provided by Archive.org Wayback Machine.
Or why not check out some of the previous designs... Nov 17, 1999 or why not go right back to Dec 23, 1996.
(\(\
(^.^)
(")")
*This is the cute bunny virus, please copy this into your sig so it can spread
also got swallowed up by them... used to be bitter riavals
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
I find their stories not timely enough anymore for an online publication. I don't think these more traditional sites can compete with the timeliness standards achieved by the blogging approach invented by /.
But: I find sme of the other CNET sites quite a bit more useful (reviews, downloads).
I used to go to cnet all the time around then, the time of launching news.com. It makes me feel a little old thinking that that's been 7 years already. The site hasn't aged well, though. I come here or various other aggregators for news first, and rarely check cnet at all anymore. If not for the very occasional download from there, I'd probably have forgotten about it by now. I guess I want more either more news at a glance than they're willing to show, or more in depth commentary than they're willing to allow. The columnists weighing in, followed by no reader input or argumentation, feels cheap now, even when the columnists are sharp people.
And the new design looks worse at a glance: same stuff, basically same layout and colors, but now featuring retro "folded corner" tabs. Nothing like trying to get your attention on news with conspicuous nostalgia.
7 years and still using vignette story-server for their backend?
i've heard from people who worked there that their content management system is a complete disaster and they have never been able to clean it up and escape from the crappy vignette software. for a site that reports on tech news, this is rather embarassing.
Well this person does not like them... Take a look Wrap and Flow
Why celebrate Cnet after 7 years? Seriously. Their website is, and always has been, an affront to nature; their news judgement myopic and journalism inept. Not to mention, they have been a scurrilous dot com in the worst tradition. Let's not get started on the horrible ad campaigns. This blind love affair with CNet has always been mystifying. I just cannot imagine a slashdotter even going their.
CNet is the USA Today of web news. Huge circulation, mediocre journalism at best.
Huh? Looks about the same as it always has. Big page of text with no images. Come to think about it, that's how most CNet pages look...
/me loves the right-click "Block Images" command...
DennyK
... and their commitment to that going forward...
Which 'going forward' are they committed to, exactly?
God I hate that phrase... Thank you Andy Grove, Craig Barret, et al for forcing me to listen to such masturbatory perversions of grammar and language... Thank you so very much... asshats...
What, is there some danger that someone will think they've invented time travel and are talking about things they'll do to the past? Is there some fear that someone might perceive they mean "going backwards" instead?
We should all synergize our back-ends to re-purpose our execution of EOL on corp-speak... going forward, of course. If anyone would like to whiteboard this in real-time I'll be leveraging some action items into my world-class 'stab a CEO's head' dart board.
*sound of my karma going down the drain*
- I am made of meat.
What, did someone break a mirror, AGAIN?
I've always enjoyed a particular quirk in cnet/news.com that expires vulnerability stories about microsoft/windows products prematurely.
(Notice that the original page in each of the stories below can be seen, you've gotta keep your eye on it though.)
Worm dupes with fake Microsoft address - May 19, 2003
have allowed a good hacker both to read files stored on the Windows NT-based Internet
descriptions were taken from google, search for more keywords associated with worms/viruses/etc + windows and you'll end up with expired pages on news.com
Blame me for being paranoid, fuck it.
even though these figures are in the thousands theyre still low (earnings), and their operating expenses are off the meter... They must think it's still like the late 90's or something blowing through all that cash...
MoFscker
... a nice Slashdotting!
Click away: newscom.com
I remember there used to be an CNET TV Show. Not their own network, but an show that was on Sunday mornings. I wonder what happened? As I remember the web-site was made to *supplement* the tv show - not the other way around.
Anyone remember the answer guys? I wonder what has happened to them. It was certianly my favorite segment of the show.
It was rather interesting... It had a lot of cool things thrown into it.. Wonder why it was cancled...
Just me
You could rewrite George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" all over again regarding corporate-speak.
- mismatched <span> tags
- mismatched <li> </li> tags
- <li> tags outside of <ul> or <ol> blocks
- mismatched <td>/</td> tags
- use of unapproved <nobr> tags (but without </nobr> closing tags)
Netscape 7 renders it OK, but all in all, I'm amazed that any browswer could, especially with the mismatched <td> </td> tags.I am not sure if the new look is good or bad but one positive is that the new site looks exactly _same_ in mozilla under both Linux and Windows. Previously under Linux I either used to get fonts too large or too small.
slikken.sl@alsik.com
translates to swallow.sl(ut)wheni.com
btw. wheni.com and untilli.com seem te be available oddly enough.
All errors in this comment are mine. Corrections are considered a derivative work, and punishable under copyright law.
A static/fixed width layout isn't a bad thing, depending on when it's used. And I'm sure the people at CNet thought about the pros and cons of a liquid layout in their design process.
For a text-heavy site such as News.com, a fixed-width layout is very ideal. If you happen to have a very high resolution, the text in a liquid/expanding design would run past the optimum line length of about 60 characters or so. Sure, you can have the browser sized to a reasonable size, but it's an added hassle. With a fixed-width website, however, the line length is much shorter. Your eyes won't get as tired from traversing the whole width of a page in a liquid layout.
It's also the same reason why newspapers run multiple narrow columns, rather than having it go across the whole page.
As a side note, Simon Willison has a nice Narrow Bookmarklet that lets you convert a website's liquid design to a fixed 500 pixel width page with one click.
Seven years and they're still making sites that have a fixed width. Really glad I bought that 23" monitor ;)
Powered by onion juice.
wasnt cnet a razorfish production?
razorfish gone..cnet soon to follow?
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Does anyone else get three screenfuls of blank space before the first headline on IE 5.0?
well, yes and no,
its nothing wrong to use a fixed width layout, but it would have been a better solution to use em rather than px to set the width, or even %,
if i increase the text-size on news.com.com it doesn't look any good, it would have been better to use a length unit that allows the page to scale with the font-size
... in which he reflects on their founding slogan of 'Tech News First' and their commitment to that going forward... Thoughts or opinions, anyone?"
I really hate that bit of idiotic business-speak, "going forward." We should all feel incentivized to leverage our existing linguistic infrastructure, and architect a solution using existing word-assets rather than repurposing them -- going forward.
Read the full article on NYTimes (registration required)
Really puts it into perspective when I hear people talking about the net and how new and exciting it is (usually older people). I was around on the net when CNET lauched. I've been using it for abut 1/3 of my life. Not so new anymore!!!
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
They used to be my favourite source of news, along with zdnet, back in the nineties until I noticed they were too often pro-Microsoft; My observation was confirmed when I realized that Paul Allen, Mirosoft's co-founder, was a major, major investor in Zdnet/Cnet.
if cnet is 7, slashdot isnt quite as old.. right?
we all know that most of the news slashdot posts is day old news.com news. I mean the new website layout has been up since sometime saturday.
If CNet news.com goes away, where will slashdot get its day old news from?
What version of Konqueror are you using?
Looks like you're in need of a KHTML update.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://slashdot. org
:)
Not that I care about as it displays fine
--
One by one the penguins steal my sanity...
Thoughts or opinions, anyone?
They're only 2 years old.
Asking for "thoughts and opinions" on Slashdot is just begging for heaps and mounds of misinformation. I figured I'd just add my fair share. :P
Whatever happend to CNET TV and more particularly Sofie Formica (if thats how you spell it).
Bring back Sofie I say!
That's very perceptive of you Mr Stapleton and rather unexpected in a G Major
http://news.com.com/ is wonderfully unprintable by Netscape 7.0 running under X on a high resolution display. I get the middle part of the text of one of the columns on page 2 of the printout and just some header and footer graphics on pages 1 and 3.
I guess the fockers didn't test their viewer using OS 9. Looks like ass on my machine. All the links on the right are way down the page. What can't anyone just use straight HTML and stop trying to be so goddamn fancy all the time?
Didn't CowboyNeal once say he wished that the ".dot" TLD had been approved, just so that he could register (read it out loud) http://slash.slashdot.dot ?
Well, how old is Slashdot?
Seven years and they're still making sites that have a fixed width
Your eyes have a fixed width. It's more comfortable for most people to read 60-column text than 120-column text. See the responses to this comment.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Not all the cool ones are taken.... I just registered strokesnatch.com and strokesnatcher.com last week. (No they're not porno sites, and this isn't a troll, it's even safe to check at work if you're a moderator and don't believe me.) I think this is a pretty cool domain, and I couldn't believe that no one else had snatched (hehe) it.
Go away, or I will replace you with a very small shell script.
CNET TV was on both The SciFi Channel and USA Network for some time, along with 2 or 3 other shows produced by CNET. As I recall, production was ended by CNET themselves. The shows were part of some weird deal where CNET paid for part of the airtime, like an infomercial, and most of the commercials were ads for the website.
There was a lot of talk at the time that they were going to start their own channel - like TechTV. But it all ended - most likely because they couldn't afford it.
it would have been a better solution to use em rather than px to set the width, or even %
I understand your point about setting text column widths in ems, but images on web sites can't easily be set to sizes in ems because the nearest-neighbor image resizing algorithm used on the most popular browser engines (MSHTML and Gecko) turns images into pixelated crud. Vote for bug 98971 at bugzilla.mozilla.org if you want this to change.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Okay, so we all know that C/NET owns news.com, but rather than run their site as that (which is a pretty good domain name), they point it to "news.com.com" which is just plain silly. Is there any kind of interesting story or reason behind this, or did the C/NET editors just wake up one day and decide they wanted their domain name to look more like a typographical error?
'Thoughts or opinions, anyone?'
Yeah, I got a thought and opinion.
You're a total fucking asshole.
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what genius came up with the idea for light grey text on a white background!?!
Maybe it was barely readable on their mac with its default gamma settings or on a CRT, but on many or most LCDs on anything other than a mac it is almost completely unreadable.
You would think that is one of the EASY things to get right!
I've noticed that Zdnet seems to mirror most of Cnet's content. Is there are major difference between the two sites? Or do they just get a lot of their content from the same source?
There was a time when I used to value the product reviews from both sites. However, I now view both sites as little more than an advertising platform for major technology manufacturers, not that that can't be one of their functions, but that they often seem to sacrifice objectivity due to this.
Nice article on there today: P2P group: We'll pay girl's RIAA bill.
Looks like Slashdot didn't need to do anything, "Grokster, StreamCast Networks, Limewire and other file-trading software companies" are offering to pick up the 12yr old's RIAA tab.
What I'd like to know is what makes seven years such a significant milestone, as opposed to say 8 or 10 years.
I've been trying to read an article someone sent me the link to for about 4 days. As far as I can tell the site is dead. The only way I was able to read the story was via google cache. Great way to run a business, .... Into the ground.
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
Woah! Hey, it looks like their new look might be cool, but i'm not really sure, cuz it's broken in IE5. Nobody supports the old guys anymore.. :-/
Maybe i should try to convince my company to upgrade? ;)
(it's a 1500+ employee company with no admin privleges on the machines, so i can't just upgrade my own [i tried.. multiple times]).
Hate the redesign. On the plus side, it uses horizontal space a bit better (my PB G4 has a wide screen), but the "GUI" looks like too much crack induced Gnome widgets and stuff.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
One word: cookies
With all CNET brands under com.com, they can track user habits between sites.
All went downhill after CNET became another Ziff-Davis property. More ads, less content...
It's still frustrating to me, years after the deal, to see CNET and ZDNET positioned as two different sites. CNET owns ZDNET, just as it owns a number of other sites on the web. It just tries to hide its ownership, to fool the user into thinking that they are two independet voices.
Ziff-Davis owns eWEEK, PC Magazine, ExtremeTech, and some other sites. Not ZDNet.
Am I the only one for whom CNET is still C64 BBS software? 10.0 was a nice rev... :)
Wasnt news.com created before Sept 1996, I know I was reading it as early as April 1996. Didnt news.com get taken over and merged with cnet at some point? I think so.
Ok so the new tabs are cool but who's the genius that decided to shrink the headlines and summaries so that they can show photos of a bunch of random people that readers couldn't care less about?
My site just turned 11 - it went on line in its infant form 9/9/1992 piggy-backing on PARC's server at Xerox. I was an 'old timer' on the web before they ever went live. Ah Cern, NCSA and Mosaic (0.4 alpha) on a VAX running BSD unix. Text only - no graphics but we were live. I've had several homes since then and changed domain names 4 times. Gawd... I got 4 hits my first year and was estatic. There were only about a dozen live sites in 1992.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
I've been reading Cnet since it first opened. Thus far, I'm not impressed with the redesign of their site. I'm finding it harder to use than before. There is almost too much white space on the main links news.com.com pages now. Going to give it a few more days.
Cnet's reporting should be taken with a grain of salt. They have always shown bias to Wintel. Case in point, their recent claim on the new iMac that Mac users have been clamoring over getting USB2.0 for years. USB2.0 has only been out for about 2 years. Most devices Mac users want use Firewire. I'm glad Apple put USB2.0 on the latest iMac, but I wouldn't say anyone was 'clamoring' for it.
but they dont have all the brands under com.com..look at shopper.cnet.com or www.zdnet.com