Virtual tours. The word virtual means “just about”. If and when it ever means anything else, cyborgs will tell us. When you click on a virtual tour hyperlink right now what you get is just about like the slide shows my parents gave in the 1960s. I tried a virtual tour of Castle Neuschwenstein in Bavaria because I wanted to see vampire boudoirs. Pathetic.
Japanese to English through Babelfish. The Perth Express is a newspaper (also on-line) printed in Japanese. Their current issue has a story on The Dark Side of Perth. After you put it through Babelfish you’ll wonder where the darkness went. There is some there but only because of wacky Japanese terms like “friendly orgy”. What’s the opposite, right?
Does anyone else feel the same? Are there any other internet downsides worth mentioning? Am I right about Virtual tours and Babelfish, at least?
Britannica.com has stopped being free. I class this as cybersucky, although I’m aware that businesses need to pay for themselves.
The UK Post Office has the most stupid site EVER. It’s ALL javascript. EVERYTHING is javascript. It’s badly planned, and badly put together. http://www.postoffice.co.uk appears to be down at the moment. Let’s hope they’re replacing it with something sensible.
Splash pages. Splash pages, especially those that play any kind of audio suck the big weasel.
Websites where everything’s in pictures, flashy flash or something else, that takes half an hour to turn up onscreen and then you find nothing informative there whatsoever. It’s usually (prolly really expensive) corporate websites as well.
How blinkin’ SLOW it is over here in the early evening–it’s barely worth going on between 7pm and 9pm.
Hi Opal! (I’ve waited one and a half years on here to do that )
Japanese to English with Babelfish. Express Perth è a newspaper (also in line) print
in the Japanese. Their current issue has one history from the dark side of Perth. After
that you put it with Babelfish you will ask where gone nerezza è. There are some lÃÂ
but only because of the Japanese terms wacky like " orgy friendly ". That what è the
opposite one, of right?
Eh. Babelfish is still better than having to learn all those languages.
I hate splash pages too. I also am beginning to loath pop-up ads with a fire approaching divine wrath.
My eternal hatred, though, is reserved for those floating layer advertisements fileplanet is starting to use. Particularly when pop up right over the link you need to hit and you don’t get an option to close them. My personal “favorite” is the American Pie 2 advert with the looping “Another time at band camp…” clip. Aaaarrrgggghhhh.
I do web page development full time for a Vo-Tech center and have the same complaint about virtual tours. To get away from doing pictures in a slide show format, we decided to have digital video clips available to download that actually showed what each class we offer was about. We called that our virtual tour and the response was amazing! People really liked it.
A college had a virtual tour website that I actually liked. Basically, it used QuicktimeVR to give the illusion of actually being in a room. Quite cool. Took forever and a day to load, though.
That’s the problem: too many Kiwis wanting virtual tours of vampire boudouirs, not enough width. On the other hand, threads like this do throw up lots of band names like The Adjectival Orgy. Babelfish, presumably, is a work in progress, and its amusing or pathetic failures are grist to some mill (the difficulty of translating this sentence contributes to Babelfish being a free service, please incant a highly idiomatic expression of cromulence).
The fact that good sites get killed by their own popularity. They draw lots of traffic becuase people want to see the site, but that increased bandwidth costs too much so they shut down.
Many sites put too much focus on how they look. They use all sorts of fancy Flash movies and javascript to destract you from the fact that they don’t have any actual content.
The internet does not include it excludes. It is not egalitarian it is elitist. Dotcom failures and the recent downturn in Internet stocks are due, in my opinion, to those facts. There is very little liaison between ISP providers and people who could benefit from using the Internet - housebound senior citizens and the disabled. Why? In my city there are evening classes where people can learn computer basics but almost no avenues for increasing knowledge at any higher level. They all cost money anyway. People either remain at the Dummies level or study for a career in computing - there is no inbetween. Manfattan just closed one of my threads in General Questions for no reason for the umpteenth time. There were no spelling mistakes but because of my poor editing the word “obsolence” is not appropriate. What can I say? My reading, writing and simple arithmetic may not be world wide web worthy.
If it can be done, it should be done. So what if a simple list of links will work as a menu? If we make it java/flash, it will LOOK COOL! Sure, we don’t NEED to have an 800k animated gif as a background, but WHY NOT?
Amazon.com. It pains me that other online stores are following the design of their site as a model. I find Amazon to be incredibly annoying.
Online shopping in general. While often convenient and easy, the main difference between online shopping and analog shopping is that between me paying and me receiving the item I bought, the brick and mortar store will usually not suddenly cease to exist.
But I think the main “problem” is that everyone is wringing their hands trying to find solutions to how the internet can make money. I recently read an article with a bunch of business people declaring the internet a failure that needs to be reworked because it’s impossible to make money on it. Never mind that it’s an incredible place for information, social agthering, entertainment, and so forth, since rich white guys can’t seem to figure out how to strip mine it, it must be worthless.
When I first got online, my main reason for wanting to be online in the first place was for the knowledge and what I called the World’s Largest Encyclopedia (my pet phrase for the www). I loved the idea of being able to look up anything, at any time, in any way or language I chose. I was dizzy with power.
I remember being told by a friend you could buy things online and how easy and cool it was to be able to. Well yeah, it’s cool, but I remember saying, “Big deal. I don’t wanna buy anything. I like being able to read and find out all sorts of stuff.”
I still use it for that reason. Surfing and learning is still a rush for me. Making money or spending money on the internet has never been that much of an interest for me. And I believe that the folks that DO consider that the main reason are the ones that are totally screwing it up for the rest of us.
I can go shopping when I want to get out of this chair. Not everything has to be done online. Unfortunately, everything CAN be.
I think the main problem with the internet is that it doesn’t charge per bandwidth in enough instances. They ought to charge not only for server space as they do now, but also for actual bandwidth used per-month. Sending or requesting anything should be charged based on the actual amount of the content sent or requested. There would have to be a system set up for servers to “exchange” payments, but overall the whole would improve: content-heavy, useless and unpopular websites would be more likely to get taken down or lightened, and good websites wouldn’t be financially penalized for their popularity no matter how heavy they were. Spam and banners of all types would die overnight: sites wouldn’t need the income from banners, and spammers would have to pay for their own transmission themselves.
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As it is there’s little reason to it: the cost of heavy users is being shifted partly to light users, and there’s little incentive to target improvements where they are needed most. - MC
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