Walmart and Best Buy ship their products very efficiently compared to the "Mail one box to your house" method used for online purchases. Think about it:
Ok, I will. The options are one truck driving systematically through a community delivering 100 packages, or 100 people in a community getting into 100 cars and driving to and from a box store to buy the same item.
I have a website filled with thousands of pages of my original content. I charge nothing for people to view my content. Next to my content I have advertising, which more than pays for the time and trouble I put into creating my content. The idea of someone taking and sharing my content (whether or not they give it away for free) could be so damaging that I might no longer be able to create free, original content.
I have a few websites, and it wouldn't take much to block all requests from charter. It would only take a few thousands webmasters boycotting places like charter and their customers would slowly migrate to better service.
When I was about 6 years old my dad bought an Atari 800 with a tape deck. I had few cartridge games for the system and we used to get a subscription to magazines with game code you could type in. We would back them up onto tape which failed so very often.
Anyway, when I was about 8 my mom bought me a game on cassette tape for the 800. The game came with a massive manual with a section devoted to descriptions of rooms. It took about a half hour to load the game off the cassette each time I wanted to play, but I would still try and play it faithfully. The game was really fun, when it would actually load. The tape eventually stopped working and I never played it again. I couldn't for the life of me remember the name, but I am thinking it was the Temple of Apshai game in the article as it looks just like it.
The system needs a good flushing. The web (and tech in general) is a mess of useless, pointless crap. Thousands if not millions of websites offering pretty much the same thing. Good examples would be the youtube clones, youtube itself being one of course. One good blog to every 1,000,000 poorly slapped together ones. Useless Bookmark/social sites like bluedot. Webmasterworld, where 500 good question/answers have been repeated 5 million times. Digg, a place to visit adsense filled blogs with one or two lines of information and a link to the actual source of information, and never worry about missing one of these adsense filled blog posts, it will be repeated on the front page at least 10 times a day. Not even going to talk about MySpace and the clone army the venture capitalists will be sold into creating.
As for tech, quit cock-teasing us and put together a phone with wireless internet, camera, mp3 player, video player, video recorder, gps, and 3d gaming. Get rid of the psp, gameboy, DS, ipod, palm, blackberry, blueberry, boysenberry, and so on.
A bubble burst only effects the crappy businesses who use copycat ideas and whose only purpose was to make a quick buck. Good-bye and good riddence.
A rock is a rock. If I pour water on the rock and it gets moss all over it, it's still a rock. If little bugs live in the moss, it's still just a rock. If I dip the rock in acid burning off all the moss and bugs, it's still just a rock. If I hide it in my freezer away from the sun and it gets really cold, it's just a really cold rock. Until I pulverize it into sand, the rock is just a rock. When humans figure out how to pulverize the earth into a fine dust, then we can talk about humans destroying the planet and it needing some type of industrial glue to put it back together again.
My personal prediction, before dinosaurs were some really big ass creatures that may or may not have had bones, maybe like in that Dune movie. They were huge but died off to make room for smaller more efficient animals like dinosaurs. Next on the chopping block came dinosars and after them, even smaller more efficient creatures took charge. Soon enough, humans will have to step aside for even smaller and especially more efficient creatures. The planet may be to small to support 20 billion humans, but it has more than enough room to support 20 trillion insects. Once the insects get done overpopulating and dying out, the microscopic organisms will get their turn. The planet will be able to support a googolplex of them.
I'm also firmly in the "You are responsible for your own damn actions, nobody else is" camp.
Your children are your responsibility and it was your decision/action that created them. They didn't ask to be born, the parents made that decision.
Maybe people who don't want to take the time or have that kind of responsibility on their shoulders shouldn't have kids and if they do, they should suffer the consequences of their childrens actions. It's not to say that yes, once in a while someone is insane, but that should be a case by case basis. It wouldn't apply to some guy who shot someone to get into a gang. That persons parents should have known what their child was doing, and if they didn't have the time/money to be able to watch a child, they shouldn't have had one.
Also, if a person does have a mentally unstable child/teen, they should know their child well enough to notice this and seek medical help. Using the excuse that, well, the kid just went insane one day, might happen, but is probably very rare.
Using a system like this wouldn't be perfect, but it would be a great improvement. Imagine that kiddie hacker who knocked a million computers offline with a virus. Sure he is only a minor and gets a severe warning, but his parents have to go spend 2 years behind bars. "Oh, but their innocent", no, they should have been paying attention to what their child was doing, it is their responsibility. A million people got their computers screwed up because his/her parents just didn't have the time to teach their child that doing something like that is immoral and wrong.
It's not the government's job to teach morals and values, it's not t.v.'s job, it's not my job either, that job lies solely on the parents. A mom who leaves a child in a car with the windows rolled up and kills him from heat exhaustion is responsible. They don't say, hey look, we can't blame the mom for the kid dying, it was the heat that killed the child. Parents are responsible for their children and how those children grow up and what kind of people they become.
I can think of a "cure" that would work much better.
For every crime a person's child commits, the parents share in the penalty, no limitations. A 42 year old man beats his wife and gets a year in prison, both his parents or guardians must also spend a year in prison, even if their 70 years old.
The problem in these type of people, or most any people, stem from childhood. For example, right now I see some kids playing in a parking lot outside my window, ages 4-7, no parents in site. I have seen the 4 year old spend hours outside by herself. Why did her parents have a child, to ignore it? If they don't have time for her at 4 years old they certainly aren't going to make time for her when she is a teenager out selling drugs or herself.
Of course people are going to say, well, my kids don't like me and might get into trouble just to make me suffer. Well, it's your own fault if your kid doesn't like you. You should have been concerned with that when they were little and needed you the most.
I just think you would find much more behaved law abiding citizens if the responsibility of raising children was put back on the parents and not on the state/public to do the parents job. If this nutjob had grown up in a loving environment and taught to treat others with dignity and respect his chances of murdering others would have been greatly diminished.
"contains only the slightest differences (probably typographical) from the book we have in the Bible today."
With some people's allergies, a can of Beanee Weenees having a few typos on it's label would be completely unnaceptable. Shouldn't we hold the writings that control the destiny of man up to a little higher standard than a can of Beanee Weenees?
The only thing I regret about religion is that the Greeks didn't win more wars. At least then little boys would get to look foward to their sunday school lessons on Aphrodite, goddess of love, beauty and sexual rapture.
They make you able to focus, and they make typically miserable tasks interesting.
If you find something boring and repetative, thats your brains way of telling you that you need to be doing something else. It's your brain crying for help, asking to be used for a more useful purpose.
Amazing world we live in, school work is boring and repetative. We can either find a better way to teach knowledge or we can give our children drugs so we can keep teaching them the defunct way.
He is just a guy, doing a task in a club that the fire martial should have closed.
I think the goal is that future pyrotechnicians won't just start lighting off fireworks and saying, "eh, it's someone else's job to worry about fire safety, not mine". Hopefully the first question out of the pyro's mouth to the club owner will be, "is this place up to code, cause my ass isn't spending 4 years in the state pen if it isn't?"
Is there any particular reason why myspace users are allowed to stream mp3 songs that I can only assume they don't have the copyright to? That and the sheer amount of hotlinking that happens there.
Those kind of services and gametap are a good start, but who wants to pay $15/month for what in reality is a bunch of old crappy games and a few decent ones. Most of the games they offer you can find on emulators.
If the developers got together and created one almighty service for $50/month I might be interested. The average gamer spends about $50/month anyway. I don't mean games like pac-man but "Farcry 2" and "Medal of Honor:Whoops we did it again". They could keep stats and even have paying contests. Even games like the new Elder Scrolls could work, even if it was to just keep stats. It would also be a great way to ban a hacker from all games at the same time.
No matter how it is done, it's all still better for both sides. The game developers make more than ever, no more distribution costs or rampant piracy. People are happy because DRM and copyright protection in games becomes a distant memory. We get to play full versions of all the newest games for $50/month. I suppose they could offer a $25/month subscription model for people who are willing to wait a year to play the newest games. No more buyers remorse, broken disks, stacks of disks, fighting copyright protection, reading biased reviews, or 500MB demos of one level.
They should give *all* the games away for free and charge $5/month to access their gaming servers. If the game is good and I play it for 2 years, they get $120 of my money for their game, more than double the $40 they would have got. If the game sucks, i'm out $5, big deal.
Since they will no longer charge for the games, they will get distributed by p2p costing the manufacturer $0 in distribution. Money they can put back into their online servers.
They could charge $50/month for people/clans to be in control of their servers and reduce the price of them hosting the games. Give the people/clans paying for the servers a cut of the action. If they run a clean server and keep it full of paying customers then they might not only end up not paying their monthly server fee but making a profit. Paid to play and admin a server. This would create great admins who would make sure customers are paying and keep out the riff-raff and team killers.
This would of course create server admins who keep trying to out do each other by creating new and better mods and maps so they can get more people to their servers. The more people that play on their servers, the more money they make. Once admins start making serious money by running a good server you'll see a flux of basement dwellers creating incredible gaming experiences and getting rich at the same time.
On top of everything else, it would be much easier for the companies to find people running illegal servers than to track illegal copying. Much easier since they would have an army of server admins who would be more than happy to hunt down illegal servers that are taking away from their potential profit.
Or, the companies could keep cripling their games and pissing off their paying customers.
The first thing I noticed when using Opera shift+f11 was that the adds on slashdot and my websites are gone. If people can't see the ads then i'm not going to bend over backwards so they can view my website on their tiny screen. I have no idea if this applies to all mobile devices or if this is something that google, amazon, ect. just don't care to address.
Besides having no ads, who wants to view great photos and hd video on a tiny screen. About the only websites that would be worth viewing are forums and news. To post to a forum with your phone you will need a separate keyboard (unless you want carpal tunnel) and if your going to carry around a separate keyboard, then you might as well buy a laptop. Since I can't compete with google news and don't run a forum, I see no reason to bother. They can still view my website, it just doesn't look very good, but what really looks good on a tiny screen anyway. I have yet to see a huge demand for the new line of 13" home LCD monitors.
I went with godaddy not because they were cheap but because they were the only company that I had heard of that offered privacy at the time. Now more big name companies are adding domain privacy, like yahoo for example.
I've had problems with godaddy before, no need to go into detail, and would be interested in going somewhere else. I don't want to move over to yahoo and then read hundreds of comments next week on here saying how bad they are. Can anyone recommend a company that is [b]well established[/b] and offers private domains?
In the rural area I live in there is one major newspaper that covers the region. The paper has been around for over 100 years and must have tens of thousands of articles and could build a massive database of information and use the web to showcase this information. A hundred years of history and photos from a region could attract visitors from all over the world. The website could potentially fill 100,000+ pages.
Instead,
They started with a pretty basic website that only covered the daily headlines. They finally revamped the website a few years ago and added the ability to look up some history and read the dialy paper online. When they updated the website, they made it subscription only except for subscribers of the newspaper. Of course, if you get the newspaper, why would you want to read it online. If you enjoy reading it online, why get the physical paper. If you don't get the physical paper, then you must pay a monthly fee to view the online content.
Even with the subscription, their online paper is small, has hardly any useful information. History only goes back a few years and contains no photos. They have no image gallery, all images are very small when they even include images. They not only don't have any type of community interaction on the website, they hide their email addresses so they don't get hassled with stupid questions (I emailed them with a question and told them how difficult it was to find their email address, thats when they told me they don't like to be hassled with questions). On top of everything else their site uses flash for the main menu and looks like a 4th grade class website project.
A few years ago I applied for a webmaster job at the newspaper and was turned down without an interview. They probably hired someone with a bachelors in english who took an html class in college.
I saw an opportunity to take advantage of their completely ignorant approach to a website. I started my own local website. I started it about 3 years ago and am still going strong
1) Bought an expensive digital camera with a shitload of memory and on the weekends I travel around the region taking photos, ~25,000 so far. I then go through my photos and pick the best and photoshop them into perfection.
2) Using a public domain mapping service, I create custom maps with directions for each city, cemetery, school and so on.
3) Bought a cheap GPS and take coordinates and altitude everyplace I go to take pictures. If someone wants to go stand in the exact spot I took a picture from, they can.
4) Didn't set up a forum but more of a community message board were people promote their local business, website, event or whatever for free.
5) Searched the internet and created a database of every local website I could find. New websites can fill out a simple one line form to get their websites added.
6) I write one article a week posted on the front page with information about a place to visit in the area or a recent major event. I also include plenty of photos.
7) I built a local search using the hand picked websites for the area ~1,500. It's not as powerful as a google search but their is 0% spam in the results.
8) I just use google for the ads. If a local place wants to put ads on my website, they can deal with google. I am actually shocked at the amount of local ads through google since I am the only website I know of in the region that uses adsense. No sales staff, no dealing with customers, no haggling over prices, and no bounced checks all equals more time to add content.
So on just the weekends, with a staff of 1 and almost no budget, I have built an interactive local website with ~6,000 pages of free searchable content covering the same region as the local newspaper. They have a staff of 75+ (not including paper boys) in a large downtown office building. For non-subscribers, their website has 3 small daily photos and headlines with news that cuts off after the first paragraph.
Deep Impact, the impression, a slew of tv commercials showing stunning special effects (for the time) of a huge tidal wave wiping out a city. Devastation and destruction and the end of the world at hand.
Deep Impact, the movie, 7 hours of boring people (who make the science channel seem like MTV) discussing how a big meteor would really suck. There was probably a love story thrown in there too, but I fell in and out of sleep so I don't remember. 4 1/2 seconds of special effects, the end.
Day After Tomorrow, the movie that Deep Impact should have been. Day After Tommorow, the movie that should have never been.
Contact, the impression, using some bigass satellite human kind makes contact with aliens. All hell breaks loose and armagedan is once again at hand!
Contact, the movie, 15 hours over explaining how radio waves work, probably some type of generic love story thrown in the mix (don't remember, kept falling asleep), 2 minutes of special effects with what appeared to be a couple of carnival rides spinning around, a strobe light and a shaky camera, the end.
Independance Day, the movie that Contact should have been. Independance Day, wished it was War of the Worlds. War of the Worlds, great movie except when any of the actors talk to each other.
Slashdot Mirror
Walmart and Best Buy ship their products very efficiently compared to the "Mail one box to your house" method used for online purchases. Think about it:
Ok, I will. The options are one truck driving systematically through a community delivering 100 packages, or 100 people in a community getting into 100 cars and driving to and from a box store to buy the same item.
I have a website filled with thousands of pages of my original content. I charge nothing for people to view my content. Next to my content I have advertising, which more than pays for the time and trouble I put into creating my content. The idea of someone taking and sharing my content (whether or not they give it away for free) could be so damaging that I might no longer be able to create free, original content.
"I, Robot" in a nutshell
I have a few websites, and it wouldn't take much to block all requests from charter. It would only take a few thousands webmasters boycotting places like charter and their customers would slowly migrate to better service.
When I was about 6 years old my dad bought an Atari 800 with a tape deck. I had few cartridge games for the system and we used to get a subscription to magazines with game code you could type in. We would back them up onto tape which failed so very often.
Anyway, when I was about 8 my mom bought me a game on cassette tape for the 800. The game came with a massive manual with a section devoted to descriptions of rooms. It took about a half hour to load the game off the cassette each time I wanted to play, but I would still try and play it faithfully. The game was really fun, when it would actually load. The tape eventually stopped working and I never played it again. I couldn't for the life of me remember the name, but I am thinking it was the Temple of Apshai game in the article as it looks just like it.
to something other than a MS operating system, welcome Google O/S + Adblock
The system needs a good flushing. The web (and tech in general) is a mess of useless, pointless crap. Thousands if not millions of websites offering pretty much the same thing. Good examples would be the youtube clones, youtube itself being one of course. One good blog to every 1,000,000 poorly slapped together ones. Useless Bookmark/social sites like bluedot. Webmasterworld, where 500 good question/answers have been repeated 5 million times. Digg, a place to visit adsense filled blogs with one or two lines of information and a link to the actual source of information, and never worry about missing one of these adsense filled blog posts, it will be repeated on the front page at least 10 times a day. Not even going to talk about MySpace and the clone army the venture capitalists will be sold into creating.
As for tech, quit cock-teasing us and put together a phone with wireless internet, camera, mp3 player, video player, video recorder, gps, and 3d gaming. Get rid of the psp, gameboy, DS, ipod, palm, blackberry, blueberry, boysenberry, and so on.
A bubble burst only effects the crappy businesses who use copycat ideas and whose only purpose was to make a quick buck. Good-bye and good riddence.
The planet would heal.
A rock is a rock. If I pour water on the rock and it gets moss all over it, it's still a rock. If little bugs live in the moss, it's still just a rock. If I dip the rock in acid burning off all the moss and bugs, it's still just a rock. If I hide it in my freezer away from the sun and it gets really cold, it's just a really cold rock. Until I pulverize it into sand, the rock is just a rock. When humans figure out how to pulverize the earth into a fine dust, then we can talk about humans destroying the planet and it needing some type of industrial glue to put it back together again.
My personal prediction, before dinosaurs were some really big ass creatures that may or may not have had bones, maybe like in that Dune movie. They were huge but died off to make room for smaller more efficient animals like dinosaurs. Next on the chopping block came dinosars and after them, even smaller more efficient creatures took charge. Soon enough, humans will have to step aside for even smaller and especially more efficient creatures. The planet may be to small to support 20 billion humans, but it has more than enough room to support 20 trillion insects. Once the insects get done overpopulating and dying out, the microscopic organisms will get their turn. The planet will be able to support a googolplex of them.
I'm also firmly in the "You are responsible for your own damn actions, nobody else is" camp.
Your children are your responsibility and it was your decision/action that created them. They didn't ask to be born, the parents made that decision.
Maybe people who don't want to take the time or have that kind of responsibility on their shoulders shouldn't have kids and if they do, they should suffer the consequences of their childrens actions. It's not to say that yes, once in a while someone is insane, but that should be a case by case basis. It wouldn't apply to some guy who shot someone to get into a gang. That persons parents should have known what their child was doing, and if they didn't have the time/money to be able to watch a child, they shouldn't have had one.
Also, if a person does have a mentally unstable child/teen, they should know their child well enough to notice this and seek medical help. Using the excuse that, well, the kid just went insane one day, might happen, but is probably very rare.
Using a system like this wouldn't be perfect, but it would be a great improvement. Imagine that kiddie hacker who knocked a million computers offline with a virus. Sure he is only a minor and gets a severe warning, but his parents have to go spend 2 years behind bars. "Oh, but their innocent", no, they should have been paying attention to what their child was doing, it is their responsibility. A million people got their computers screwed up because his/her parents just didn't have the time to teach their child that doing something like that is immoral and wrong.
It's not the government's job to teach morals and values, it's not t.v.'s job, it's not my job either, that job lies solely on the parents. A mom who leaves a child in a car with the windows rolled up and kills him from heat exhaustion is responsible. They don't say, hey look, we can't blame the mom for the kid dying, it was the heat that killed the child. Parents are responsible for their children and how those children grow up and what kind of people they become.
I can think of a "cure" that would work much better.
For every crime a person's child commits, the parents share in the penalty, no limitations. A 42 year old man beats his wife and gets a year in prison, both his parents or guardians must also spend a year in prison, even if their 70 years old.
The problem in these type of people, or most any people, stem from childhood. For example, right now I see some kids playing in a parking lot outside my window, ages 4-7, no parents in site. I have seen the 4 year old spend hours outside by herself. Why did her parents have a child, to ignore it? If they don't have time for her at 4 years old they certainly aren't going to make time for her when she is a teenager out selling drugs or herself.
Of course people are going to say, well, my kids don't like me and might get into trouble just to make me suffer. Well, it's your own fault if your kid doesn't like you. You should have been concerned with that when they were little and needed you the most.
I just think you would find much more behaved law abiding citizens if the responsibility of raising children was put back on the parents and not on the state/public to do the parents job. If this nutjob had grown up in a loving environment and taught to treat others with dignity and respect his chances of murdering others would have been greatly diminished.
Funniest thing i've read all month.
"contains only the slightest differences (probably typographical) from the book we have in the Bible today."
With some people's allergies, a can of Beanee Weenees having a few typos on it's label would be completely unnaceptable. Shouldn't we hold the writings that control the destiny of man up to a little higher standard than a can of Beanee Weenees?
The only thing I regret about religion is that the Greeks didn't win more wars. At least then little boys would get to look foward to their sunday school lessons on Aphrodite, goddess of love, beauty and sexual rapture.
They make you able to focus, and they make typically miserable tasks interesting.
If you find something boring and repetative, thats your brains way of telling you that you need to be doing something else. It's your brain crying for help, asking to be used for a more useful purpose.
Amazing world we live in, school work is boring and repetative. We can either find a better way to teach knowledge or we can give our children drugs so we can keep teaching them the defunct way.
How about captcha mini-games, Ball in a Hole
He is just a guy, doing a task in a club that the fire martial should have closed.
I think the goal is that future pyrotechnicians won't just start lighting off fireworks and saying, "eh, it's someone else's job to worry about fire safety, not mine". Hopefully the first question out of the pyro's mouth to the club owner will be, "is this place up to code, cause my ass isn't spending 4 years in the state pen if it isn't?"
Is there any particular reason why myspace users are allowed to stream mp3 songs that I can only assume they don't have the copyright to? That and the sheer amount of hotlinking that happens there.
Would a person willing to brainwash his own children have a second thought about charging money to strangers for an inferior product?
Those kind of services and gametap are a good start, but who wants to pay $15/month for what in reality is a bunch of old crappy games and a few decent ones. Most of the games they offer you can find on emulators.
If the developers got together and created one almighty service for $50/month I might be interested. The average gamer spends about $50/month anyway. I don't mean games like pac-man but "Farcry 2" and "Medal of Honor:Whoops we did it again". They could keep stats and even have paying contests. Even games like the new Elder Scrolls could work, even if it was to just keep stats. It would also be a great way to ban a hacker from all games at the same time.
No matter how it is done, it's all still better for both sides. The game developers make more than ever, no more distribution costs or rampant piracy. People are happy because DRM and copyright protection in games becomes a distant memory. We get to play full versions of all the newest games for $50/month. I suppose they could offer a $25/month subscription model for people who are willing to wait a year to play the newest games. No more buyers remorse, broken disks, stacks of disks, fighting copyright protection, reading biased reviews, or 500MB demos of one level.
Here's my solution,
They should give *all* the games away for free and charge $5/month to access their gaming servers. If the game is good and I play it for 2 years, they get $120 of my money for their game, more than double the $40 they would have got. If the game sucks, i'm out $5, big deal.
Since they will no longer charge for the games, they will get distributed by p2p costing the manufacturer $0 in distribution. Money they can put back into their online servers.
They could charge $50/month for people/clans to be in control of their servers and reduce the price of them hosting the games. Give the people/clans paying for the servers a cut of the action. If they run a clean server and keep it full of paying customers then they might not only end up not paying their monthly server fee but making a profit. Paid to play and admin a server. This would create great admins who would make sure customers are paying and keep out the riff-raff and team killers.
This would of course create server admins who keep trying to out do each other by creating new and better mods and maps so they can get more people to their servers. The more people that play on their servers, the more money they make. Once admins start making serious money by running a good server you'll see a flux of basement dwellers creating incredible gaming experiences and getting rich at the same time.
On top of everything else, it would be much easier for the companies to find people running illegal servers than to track illegal copying. Much easier since they would have an army of server admins who would be more than happy to hunt down illegal servers that are taking away from their potential profit.
Or, the companies could keep cripling their games and pissing off their paying customers.
If you keep reusing the same code it will never get any better, nor will you.
Does AJAX do anything that Flash can't?
The first thing I noticed when using Opera shift+f11 was that the adds on slashdot and my websites are gone. If people can't see the ads then i'm not going to bend over backwards so they can view my website on their tiny screen. I have no idea if this applies to all mobile devices or if this is something that google, amazon, ect. just don't care to address.
Besides having no ads, who wants to view great photos and hd video on a tiny screen. About the only websites that would be worth viewing are forums and news. To post to a forum with your phone you will need a separate keyboard (unless you want carpal tunnel) and if your going to carry around a separate keyboard, then you might as well buy a laptop. Since I can't compete with google news and don't run a forum, I see no reason to bother. They can still view my website, it just doesn't look very good, but what really looks good on a tiny screen anyway. I have yet to see a huge demand for the new line of 13" home LCD monitors.
I went with godaddy not because they were cheap but because they were the only company that I had heard of that offered privacy at the time. Now more big name companies are adding domain privacy, like yahoo for example.
I've had problems with godaddy before, no need to go into detail, and would be interested in going somewhere else. I don't want to move over to yahoo and then read hundreds of comments next week on here saying how bad they are. Can anyone recommend a company that is [b]well established[/b] and offers private domains?
In the rural area I live in there is one major newspaper that covers the region. The paper has been around for over 100 years and must have tens of thousands of articles and could build a massive database of information and use the web to showcase this information. A hundred years of history and photos from a region could attract visitors from all over the world. The website could potentially fill 100,000+ pages.
Instead,
They started with a pretty basic website that only covered the daily headlines. They finally revamped the website a few years ago and added the ability to look up some history and read the dialy paper online. When they updated the website, they made it subscription only except for subscribers of the newspaper. Of course, if you get the newspaper, why would you want to read it online. If you enjoy reading it online, why get the physical paper. If you don't get the physical paper, then you must pay a monthly fee to view the online content.
Even with the subscription, their online paper is small, has hardly any useful information. History only goes back a few years and contains no photos. They have no image gallery, all images are very small when they even include images. They not only don't have any type of community interaction on the website, they hide their email addresses so they don't get hassled with stupid questions (I emailed them with a question and told them how difficult it was to find their email address, thats when they told me they don't like to be hassled with questions). On top of everything else their site uses flash for the main menu and looks like a 4th grade class website project.
A few years ago I applied for a webmaster job at the newspaper and was turned down without an interview. They probably hired someone with a bachelors in english who took an html class in college.
I saw an opportunity to take advantage of their completely ignorant approach to a website. I started my own local website. I started it about 3 years ago and am still going strong
1) Bought an expensive digital camera with a shitload of memory and on the weekends I travel around the region taking photos, ~25,000 so far. I then go through my photos and pick the best and photoshop them into perfection.
2) Using a public domain mapping service, I create custom maps with directions for each city, cemetery, school and so on.
3) Bought a cheap GPS and take coordinates and altitude everyplace I go to take pictures. If someone wants to go stand in the exact spot I took a picture from, they can.
4) Didn't set up a forum but more of a community message board were people promote their local business, website, event or whatever for free.
5) Searched the internet and created a database of every local website I could find. New websites can fill out a simple one line form to get their websites added.
6) I write one article a week posted on the front page with information about a place to visit in the area or a recent major event. I also include plenty of photos.
7) I built a local search using the hand picked websites for the area ~1,500. It's not as powerful as a google search but their is 0% spam in the results.
8) I just use google for the ads. If a local place wants to put ads on my website, they can deal with google. I am actually shocked at the amount of local ads through google since I am the only website I know of in the region that uses adsense. No sales staff, no dealing with customers, no haggling over prices, and no bounced checks all equals more time to add content.
So on just the weekends, with a staff of 1 and almost no budget, I have built an interactive local website with ~6,000 pages of free searchable content covering the same region as the local newspaper. They have a staff of 75+ (not including paper boys) in a large downtown office building. For non-subscribers, their website has 3 small daily photos and headlines with news that cuts off after the first paragraph.
Deep Impact, the impression, a slew of tv commercials showing stunning special effects (for the time) of a huge tidal wave wiping out a city. Devastation and destruction and the end of the world at hand.
Deep Impact, the movie, 7 hours of boring people (who make the science channel seem like MTV) discussing how a big meteor would really suck. There was probably a love story thrown in there too, but I fell in and out of sleep so I don't remember. 4 1/2 seconds of special effects, the end.
Day After Tomorrow, the movie that Deep Impact should have been. Day After Tommorow, the movie that should have never been.
Contact, the impression, using some bigass satellite human kind makes contact with aliens. All hell breaks loose and armagedan is once again at hand!
Contact, the movie, 15 hours over explaining how radio waves work, probably some type of generic love story thrown in the mix (don't remember, kept falling asleep), 2 minutes of special effects with what appeared to be a couple of carnival rides spinning around, a strobe light and a shaky camera, the end.
Independance Day, the movie that Contact should have been. Independance Day, wished it was War of the Worlds. War of the Worlds, great movie except when any of the actors talk to each other.