MetaFilter. It’s like an intelligent Fark, and I’ve discovered a ton of great new Web sites from reading it faithfiully on a daily basis. I’m frustrated, though, at how it seems like so many submittals are somehow spun into an anti-America or anti-Israel statement by MetaFilter posters. ARGH!
What Web sites do you love that also drive you nuts at the same time?
The Straight Dope Message Board - serious. I love it, and read it all the time, but it drives me crazy because right now I’m halfway through a class requiring a 5k word paper, and I haven’t started (or picked a topic for that matter) but I could be working on that. I’m at work, bored, and was watching television. Then I logged on to the dope, I’ll be here till morning. I never get anything done this way.
Blogs that are usually regularly updated. I read Dumblittleman.com, Lifeclever.com, and sometimes Postsecret. Usually I get at least a post a week from them, sometimes much more, but when it goes 4 days without a post, or a week or two, I don’t know what to do. I know that it’s not a huge problem, but it makes me angry a little.
Brendon Small
Yeah, The Straightdope. Interesting, but sometimes S-L-O-W.
allmusic.com. I use this site just about daily, for research into CD releases for my database. I realize that thousands of people may be using it at any given time, but this site is now having some extended timeouts and page loading issues. When it times out, you are redirected to a page that says Error - Timeout, instead of getting a Windows popup saying “The document contains no data.” Sometimes you get a page that has the template for an amg page, with no data on it.
The other irksome thing is how they have each CD by thousands of artists listed three, four, five and six times under different variations of its label name and catalogue number, at the bottom of each page. Somebody needs to do some serious cleanup of their database. It’s admirable how they are attempting to review as many albums as possible. But in a lot of instances, somebody has stopped just short of excellence, or even helpfulness.
Huffington post.com
They provide a lot of information that does not seem to be reported anywhere else, usually info that might appeal to one with a left of center perspective. Sadly in their zeal to report these items or to gain supporters for their agenda the headlines on stories and articles frequently mis represent the content of the article or story. In my mind this is very counterproductive and causes me some level of frustration.