A million pounds down the drain
11th July 2002
This site will make you cry: Connected Earth, BT’s new million pound (yes that’s £1,000,000) online museum devoted to the history of communications. It’s so bad it isn’t even funny—and don’t even think about trying to visit without Flash (I did and was presented with an alternative interface consisting of a single select box that refused to respond to mouse clicks). Load up on IE5+ and Flash and you’ll be treated to the single most unintuitive interface I have ever seen—good luck figuring out what the small, identical purple circles do. There are 2,000 pages of extensively researched content in there somewhere—obviously the designers thought it would be more “sticky” if you had to work really hard to find them. I could rant more, but quite frankly I just want to go to bed.
Update: On second thoughts, if you have a blog—blog it. Enough blogger interest leads to mainstream media interest, and the more bad press this gets the better. Sites like this can not be allowed to go without comment, and the more comment the better. Let’s humiliate these people in to never, ever creating something this bad again.
More recent articles
- Weeknotes: Llama 3, AI for Data Journalism, llm-evals and datasette-secrets - 23rd April 2024
- Options for accessing Llama 3 from the terminal using LLM - 22nd April 2024
- AI for Data Journalism: demonstrating what we can do with this stuff right now - 17th April 2024
- Three major LLM releases in 24 hours (plus weeknotes) - 10th April 2024
- Building files-to-prompt entirely using Claude 3 Opus - 8th April 2024
- Running OCR against PDFs and images directly in your browser - 30th March 2024
- llm cmd undo last git commit - a new plugin for LLM - 26th March 2024
- Building and testing C extensions for SQLite with ChatGPT Code Interpreter - 23rd March 2024
- Claude and ChatGPT for ad-hoc sidequests - 22nd March 2024
- Weeknotes: the aftermath of NICAR - 16th March 2024