CNET News.com Turns 7

dmehus writes "Just as Google celebrated its 5th birthday last week, which was covered by Slashdot, I thought it would be equally appropriate to point out that tech news darling CNET News.com celebrated its 7th birthday this past week. To mark that occasion, its Editor-in-Chief Jai Singh wrote an article, in which he reflects on their founding slogan of 'Tech News First' and their commitment to that going forward. He also announces a brand new redesign that was unveiled yesterday. To that I'd add, here's to another seven more! Thoughts or opinions, anyone?"

Yay for tableless design.

[reaper20]

Wow, CSS, XHTML, and and lots of div tags. Doesn't validate, but they're better off than they used to be, at least they made an attempt I guess.

To bad they ruin it with static width pages. You'd think they'd know this after 7 years.

Re:Domain name..

[gfody]

sigh.. and dotcomat.com is cybersquatted just like any other imaginable cool domain name. remember when network solutions had a "strict policy" on cyber squatting? I imagine flipping thru channels on tv and all the low numbers 1-99 show blank screens or "coming soon" where as all the good shit is on channel 249820 or 873923 or something

Hyper-commercial and poorly designed

[sunspot42]

I used to frequent CNet every day back around 1999, and I found them to be a timely, valuable resource. But something happened in early 2001, and they began to go downhill rapidly. The site design became cluttered and severely commercialized, to the point where it became difficult to get a page to load properly - even over a DSL connection - because of all the junk slapped on it.

The sluggish performance and cluttered pages would be worth trudging through if there were some solid content behind them. Their hardware and software reviews were once top notch, but now I can find better elsewhere - Tom's Hardware, for example, or a slew of specialized sites (silentpcreview, for example, or mini-itx). Even the amateur reviews at Epinions or Amazon are more informative (taken in aggregate).

Frankly, I'm amazed CNet has lasted this long.

Old in more ways than one

[Felonius Thunk]

I used to go to cnet all the time around then, the time of launching news.com. It makes me feel a little old thinking that that's been 7 years already. The site hasn't aged well, though. I come here or various other aggregators for news first, and rarely check cnet at all anymore. If not for the very occasional download from there, I'd probably have forgotten about it by now. I guess I want more either more news at a glance than they're willing to show, or more in depth commentary than they're willing to allow. The columnists weighing in, followed by no reader input or argumentation, feels cheap now, even when the columnists are sharp people.

And the new design looks worse at a glance: same stuff, basically same layout and colors, but now featuring retro "folded corner" tabs. Nothing like trying to get your attention on news with conspicuous nostalgia.

Re:Congrats!

[pinkocommie]

I used to like Cnet but that was before they were acquired by Ziff Davis. Somehow after that they always seemed non committal about the pro's / con's of the stuff they reviewed, no BITE, nothing actually sucked etc. Then again, maybe its me :)

keep in mind...

[segment]

even though these figures are in the thousands theyre still low (earnings), and their operating expenses are off the meter... They must think it's still like the late 90's or something blowing through all that cash...

Re:Congrats!

[sniggly]

But at slashdot we the users get to add in useless comments! Seriously though comparing slashdot to cnet news is comparing apples to oranges. Both are fruit. At slashdot news items are posted for the discussion although for a lot of users its a great collection of news items in their profession and/or interest area.

Looks fine in Safari.

[Xenex]

What version of Konqueror are you using?

Looks like you're in need of a KHTML update.

Re:Congrats!

[mikis]

I tought it was vice versa: CNET aquired ZD. See CNET buys rival Ziff-Davis for $1.6 billion [com.com]