CNET News.com Turns 7 172
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?"
Congrats! (Score:5, Interesting)
To be in business 7 years is a great accomplishment though, and my congratulations go out to them.
I, also updated my design yesterday. (Score:1, Interesting)
Validation [w3.org]
It looks like ass in konqueror.
They're 10? I thought they died long ago! (Score:2, Interesting)
I personally stopped reading anything with a double dot com url. And I don't think I'm the only one.
Early Bias (Score:3, Interesting)
zd net (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yay for tableless design. (Score:2, Interesting)
Let's face it (Score:1, Interesting)
cnet & microsoft expired pages (Score:3, Interesting)
(Notice that the original page in each of the stories below can be seen, you've gotta keep your eye on it though.)
Worm dupes with fake Microsoft address - May 19, 2003 [news.com]
have allowed a good hacker both to read files stored on the Windows NT-based Internet [news.com]
descriptions were taken from google, search for more keywords associated with worms/viruses/etc + windows and you'll end up with expired pages on news.com
Blame me for being paranoid, fuck it.
Remember way back when? (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyone remember the answer guys? I wonder what has happened to them. It was certianly my favorite segment of the show.
Re:Yay for tableless design. (Score:1, Interesting)
I remember when CNET was on Sci-Fi.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:zd net (Score:3, Interesting)
MT.
Fixed-width layouts are good for text-heavy sites (Score:5, Interesting)
For a text-heavy site such as News.com, a fixed-width layout is very ideal. If you happen to have a very high resolution, the text in a liquid/expanding design would run past the optimum line length of about 60 characters or so. Sure, you can have the browser sized to a reasonable size, but it's an added hassle. With a fixed-width website, however, the line length is much shorter. Your eyes won't get as tired from traversing the whole width of a page in a liquid layout.
It's also the same reason why newspapers run multiple narrow columns, rather than having it go across the whole page.
As a side note, Simon Willison has a nice Narrow Bookmarklet [incutio.com] that lets you convert a website's liquid design to a fixed 500 pixel width page with one click.
Re:Domain name.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Early Bias (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Remember way back when? (Score:3, Interesting)
Eventually they'd starting doing 30-45 super-quick segments with no depth and maybe flash a website for half a second at the end and then say, "If you missed any of that, head on over to our website, CNET.com..."
The show became very light on substance and was soon just a nonstop plug for its website.
On another note, CNET launched an actual broadcast radio station in the San Francisco Bay Area a few years ago at 910 AM. It mysteriously disappeared from the air at the beginning of this year and turned into a news-talk station.
Not even /. is HTML valid (Score:5, Interesting)
Not that I care about as it displays fine
Re:Redesign (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the most useful redesign that CNET has done in the past was to stop insisting that everyone spell their name c|net, using the pipe character. Too many of the more common fonts on various platforms lacked that particular glyph.
Of course, they were born in the era of TAFKAP (pronounced "Squiggle"), interCapitals, emoticons, and the widespread discovery of <SHIFT>-2, so you can at least understand their impulse to acquire an exoteric punctuation mark all their own.
But of course, after backing down about the pipe, they tried to one-up Sun: CNET, we're ".com" in ".com.com", so maybe they haven't really learned...
Re:They're 10? I thought they died long ago! (Score:3, Interesting)
And slashdot would have significantly less links/stories if cnet were to die.
What's the deal with com.com? (Score:3, Interesting)