Slashdot Mirror
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
How old is news.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com?
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 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 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.
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
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
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...
While I agree that CNET isn't particularly good, I don't think they are overly MS biased. You see a lot of Linux and Apple articles on there as well, and MS is the biggest player in software at the moment. And as far as quality goes, they're sort of the AP of the tech news world, you see it there early on, and then find a better article a few hours later.
And slashdot would have significantly less links/stories if cnet were to die.
"Windows Me offers tremendous reliability and stability improvements..." -- Paul Thurott
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?