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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?"
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.
sigh.. and dotcomat.com is cybersquatted just like any other imaginable cool domain name. remember when network solutions had a "strict policy" on cyber squatting? I imagine flipping thru channels on tv and all the low numbers 1-99 show blank screens or "coming soon" where as all the good shit is on channel 249820 or 873923 or something
bite my glorious golden ass.
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.
I used to like Cnet but that was before they were acquired by Ziff Davis. Somehow after that they always seemed non committal about the pro's / con's of the stuff they reviewed, no BITE, nothing actually sucked etc. Then again, maybe its me :)
I tought it was vice versa: CNET aquired ZD. See CNET buys rival Ziff-Davis for $1.6 billion