Website design.

To me one of the most important aspects of real life/people online is the aesthetics, not only does it have to be user friendly, it also has to look good. Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but if something looks naff, then I think we can all agree that it looks awful.

Personally for me, I prefer clean, simple sites. White, and off grey is the new black. My two favourite sites have to be Apple an Dazed Digital. Love or hate Macs you can't deny that Apple have the eye for timeless design, it's simple yet effective, and very clutter free. It makes it easier to navigate the site and also doesn't make you blind.

On the same note Dazed is simple and classly like Apple, but it has an edge to to it, it feels much more exciting and...youthful. Normally you wouldn't think having a site that all in black would be all that attractive, but the use of simple tables and little splashes of colour really give Dazed the upper hand. Not only does it look stunning it's also much easier to use. It's not laden down with text, opting instead to use classic black and white images.

Of course there are negatives to having that many images, or using too many flash scripts, but who cares, who still uses DSL nowadays anyway?!

Wired.com

Wired.com is the online counterpart to Wired magazine, a techiefied geek mag (i'll admit that I did enjoy reading it...ahem). The magazine is...well, it's geek sleek. Unfortunately the same can't be said for Wired.com. The layout leaves a lot to be desired...as does the navigation...as does the style, in fact the whole thing is just plain awful. Of course there are worse sites around (hello independent online) but i'm not reviewing them now, am I?!

My main issue I would have with Wired.com is the sheer amount of text that is on the page. In this article about crazed internet lovers there are 3 solid pages of writing, if I had to take a guestimation, i'd say about 1000 words per page. Now, I may not be the sharpest tool in the box, but I invite you to try and find anyone who can read that much on a computer screen without going blind.

Like most online counterparts the content is also no different to the content that you would find in the magazine, which is a shame really, of course not all magazines can afford to pay for a whole new team to create an online equivalent to such a high standard, but I would have thought with a magazine such as wired, where it's key readers probably live on the computer, they would have made the effort to appease them. The only difference between the magazine and website is the full transcript of the IM conversations had. Oh joy.

In general, other than the content and writing style, there isn't anything I like about wired.com. 'Yeah, so, the journalist is good, what's the problem?!' I hear you saying. If journalism was purely about the writing, why not just print it on the back of a toilet role and be done with it? It's the whole package, as they say, and wired.com is sorely missing a large chunk of it.

Trent Lott

Trent Lott was a US Senator from Mississippi, who resigned after making controversial racist remarks at an event.

An off-air Journalist, Ed O'keefe was in the room when he Lott makes the remarks and attempted to sell the story to national newspapers. However the nationals didn't see this as newsworthy so they ignored it. So, O'keefe and other bloggers kept the story alive, and eventually gained enough attention for the national newspapers to take notice and print articles, which ultimately led to Lott's resignation.

Google News

For the past week i've checked my page at Google news , which I customised to my liking. In theory it's a good idea. You start with eight news sections (World, Entertainment, Sports ect) and you can add your own custom section and arrange it in any order you like.

So, of course I added 24, music and television. Yay, now just sit back and wait for loads of top stories about these topics, right? No, not so much. Sit back and wait for Google to find all recent stories with the words '24, music and television' in them. As you can see, this may be a problem. Today for example, under the 24 section there are stories about '24inch Plasma screens' and some conferences that are being held on the 24th April.

Of course you can add more key works. For example 'Music+Indie' or '24+Jack Bauer+FOX'. This does filter the bulk of the articles that are found, but it's still not perfect. In fact, it's far from perfect, but it is a quick and easy way to find articles. You don't have to do anything. Just let the machine do it for you, however in this case I would say the human element would have more success, especially if you're looking for something more specific.

Links

All internet statistics from around the globe. The information on UK ages is page 13. [Worldwide Internet users]

Age.net. A age friendly site for the UK over 50's. [Age.net]

A site for people who are retired, or of the age of retiring. Gives advice for those who are retired. Where to go and what to do, ect. [Too young to retire.]

A list of websits for the elderly. [List]

BBC article about am old man married to a Chinese woman. They met on a internet dating site. [Old man. Young wife]

Artcle about 'Pensioners embracing the internet'. [Bizreport]

Affluent pensioners spending more money on the net. [BBC]

Critical evaluation

I was given the task of writing about film and TV for our ReviewTube blog, and on Monday I had the ‘Tube of the Day’. Overall I had a good experience posting on the blog, and bar one day I was successful at posting daily.

The aspect that worked well for the blog, I thought, was the layout, logo and slogan. It was simplistic yet it made it obvious what they blog was about, as well incorporating some slight humour via the pun on the name ‘YouTube’. As the target audience for our blog were students, I think we all successfully managed to attain to this level, creating a humours, colloquial style which suited our blog, and we all complimented one another with our style and posting.

The blog was very well organised beforehand, whereby we all knew what we were to post and when. Very rarely were posts made on top of one another or forgotten about.

Generally I am happy with the posts I made, especially the video choices. However, there were a couple of posts were the style wandered slightly from the norm, and became maybe too pretentious, however these only came with shows/films that I was unfamiliar with, but I did attempt to post various different videos from different genres.

My main problem was finding material to post. YouTube has over 5 million different videos and it did become laborious to search for one video that I found suitable and met the criteria that I had set. I didn’t want to just find a trailer and review it. I didn’t find any problems with posting everyday, however there was a day where I forgot. I found the more I posted the easier it became for me to review the videos, and maintain a similar style.

Why YouTube makes baby Jesus cry laugh.

YouTube is the mother of all inventions that allows lazy teens and bored office workers like myself whittle away the hours of the day laughing at others misfortunes and/or stupidity.

Just search 'man falling down' and you'll find hours of entertainment, or more importantily you'll find hours of free entertainment. YouTube is a canvas for many to post their latest short film or a place for fans to share their videos of a their favourite band playing live.

This video shows how amazing YouTube really is.



Don't judge me. I know you laughed too! OK, so if you have somewhat of a conscience (I said if) how about this? Basically the same video, only you won't get bad karma for laughing at young children crying.



The best thing about YouTube is that you can even do it yourself. So, go get yourself a camera, a young child and scare away.