Gawker: valleywag, downtime

YouTube robots attempt to communicate with puny humans

Paul Boutin — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 11:29:39 EST

This morning's temporary YouTube overload didn't bring civilization to its knees. But I love the error message, "please include the following information in your error report" followed by a page of spew. My knowledge of software engineering is years out of whack now, but I have to ask: If you can deliver this data to the user's browser window, why do they then need to cut and paste it into an error report?

Want more traffic? Throw your widgets overboard

Paul Boutin — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:40:00 EDT

"Some blogs, like TechCrunch and Mashable are so loaded with widgets that they take at least 30 seconds to fully render," gripes a post by frequent Valleywag commenter Alan Wilensky. So true! When I was a website producer, I used to plot page load times versus daily pageviews. Load speed affected traffic — and hence revenue and brand reach— far more than I could convince my managers.

The time it takes before the main text and/or images load matter, too, because most readers will start reading the page as soon as there's something to look at, rather than waiting for everything to settle into place. Dave Winer's Scripting News is a living lesson in speed over flash. I hit Dave's site once a day because I know it'll take under 10 seconds to load the page, scroll down it for Valleywag-grade dirt, and then move on to another site. Yet for whatever reason, I've never been able to personally convince anyone to lighten up a heavy front door. Oh, everyone who cares uses RSS now. Tech people have the best excuses for laziness.

Hulu widgets let you watch TV while pretending to use Internet

Paul Boutin — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 13:00:00 EDT

Finally a widget I can get behind: TV and movie site Hulu has built a set of highly configurable widgets that can preview or even play full episodes in the middle of a Web page. Now if only they'd carry the entire Season 4 backlog of Battlestar Galactica.

Even the Yahoo billboard is messed up

Paul Boutin — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 12:40:00 EDT

Sometimes a picture is worth 100 words. Note the "VA" up top, too. (For non-Valleys, Google Street View shows where Yahoo's famous roadside billboard sits along the San Francisco onramp to the Bay Bridge.) Yahoo's lavish parody of a Holiday Inn sign went up during the craziest part of the Web 1.0 boom. The message — "A nice place to stay on the Internet" — was crafted to counter the conventional wisdom that Web surfers used "portals" like Yahoo for a quick search, then clicked away to spend their time at "destination" sites somewhere else. Yahoo needed to convince investors and everyone else that its site was a destination, not a portal, and that it was "sticky" even though everyone eventually went somewhere else after a few minutes. Hence the Internet-motel metaphor. Pop quiz for geeks: Can someone calculate the monthly electric bill for this thing? (Photo by Ben Roodman)

A joke for IT people only

Paul Boutin — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 19:40:00 EDT

It is pointless to try to explain the multiple geek gags in this screenshot. Laugh, or don't.