Slashdot Mirror
The Dot Com Super Bowl
An anonymous reader writes "Remember Epidemic.com and Lifeminders.com? Me neither. But Forbes has a funny story looking back on these dot-bombs and a bunch of other internet startups which advertised during the 2000 Super Bowl. They call the game The Bubble Bowl since over a dozen internet companies blew $40 million on ads, and then most of them went out of business. It's cool to see the ads (I miss the pets.com sock puppet!) and remember some of these crackheaded business ideas."
Maybe it's just me, but I felt like when I went to the Forbes site I felt like it was one big commercial. The first link has about a dozen ads, and the second link is doing constant updates - seemed to be worse in IE than Firefox.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
let's not single out the people with "crackheaded" ideas for scrutny and remember the VCs that believed those ideas were worth their money.
I read the article. Some of it was amusing.
But the idiot in charge of writing that moronic javascript slideshow needs to be shot. Or fired. Or both.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
The idiot in charge of writing that moronic javascript slideshow needs to be fired. Out of a cannon. Into the sun.
The tackle on the one yard line, with time expired, to prevent a game-tying touchdown? Yeah, there's probably not a football fan alive who remembers that ending. I guess my brain is too full of memories of the Cowboys beating the Bills 48-14 six years in a row.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
am i mistaken to think that "NSFW" is not a commonly used acronym here..?
Yes. You are also mistaken to think that sentences aren't supposed to begin with capital letters, that the personal pronoun "I" can be used without capitalization, that two periods followed by a question mark is a punctuation mark and that it's okay to end a sentence with an ellipsis without a period.
Furthermore, please avoid the use of acronyms that aren't already accepted as words themselves. You can say things like "DVD" and "CPU" because they're universally understood, but generally acronyms serve only to hinder communication, not to facilitate it. This isn't 1850. You're not Western Union by the letter.
At this very moment, this Web site is running a story called "Don't Write FORTRAN" that cleverly (or, you know, not) admonishes computer programmers for writing illiterate computer code. Might I humbly suggest that we hold ourselves to the same standard when it comes to things meant to be read by other human beings?
Didn't marketing think that
1) People would continue watching the Super Bowl
2) Even if people were captivated by the ad, visit the website, and not call??
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
Then the slideshow starts, and I glance away at my other box to do some more work--only to discover that it's done. It automatically changes slides, unlike every other gallery and in fact site on the Internet, which lets one choose when to change pages. Peeved, I click 'previous' a dozen times (they don't give one a 'first' button), then quickly hit 'stop' (yeah, thanks for making me work at this, forbes.com). I read the first slide, chuckle and hit 'next.' The next slide appears, and as I'm reading it, it changes: they don't remember that one wants the show to be stopped!
What sort of microcephalic twit would think this is a good browsing experience?