Journal: Print This Article!

Browse around to any "news" site -- I include the wanna-bes in with the "real" sites -- and you'll see a particularly atrocious addition to the Web experience, inflicted upon us by the lame and clueless: the "Print This Article" link, whose sole purpose is to format the page in the style we would prefer to see in the first place.

It must be an American affectation to be so resolutely obtuse: take what we want and like, intentionally munge it up into some steaming turd, then offer the option to convert it to the way we preferred in the first place, and then call it a "feature". This abortion of an idea is usually corralled with a few other future glue sticks, the "Email this article to a friend" and "Respond in our '$COMMENT_SECTION_NAME_FROM_MARKETING'". While these two have some arguable merit, the "Print This Article" is pure bozoness.

Oh, I understand the reasoning well enough: divide an article into sections and make them separate pages so they can fling more banner ads at our eyeballs. The reasoning -- while it sounds good to crack-addled bean counters -- ends up running about in a tight circle, like a wino in an Italian alley. "Banner ads don't work, people ignore them, so let's architect our site to feed MORE ADS to our users, so the ads can be worth LESS THAN BEFORE, so we can re-architect in 6-8 months to have banner ads display BETWEEN EVERY OTHER WORD..." and so forth, ad infiniteum.

If marketing majors actually cared about their jobs (instead of falling into the major when they flunked out of business school, after blowing off a final with a Dionysian Orgy of Excess at the frathouse the night before), they'd operate a web site on the principle that the ads can be sold on stories, but should never be visible until a story has been selected to view. At that point you know at least something about your viewer (they're interested in "X", since the article is about "X in our schools"), and a decent sized article has at least three good places to sell an ad -- the beginning, middle and end.

The dolts that come to a site's home page are the unwashed vermin: they could be Warren Buffet, but are more likely to be Wilber Beauchamp, lube monkey from West Undershirt, Idaho and secret teen porn afficianado. The best you can sell them are Visa cards from unheard of banks in suspicious countries. But that untapped genius who clicks through to an in-depth article on sewer drains? If you can't sell a ballcock to this guy, you should probably go back to Ball Peen State (Home of the 'Fighting Cantalopes') and ask for your money back.