Last week, I asked you to send in ideas for “Web Stuff I Hate” — and thanks to the resulting flood of e-mail, I have enough material for many columns. I will start by listing a few this week and continue to do so in the weeks ahead. You can keep sending in your ideas — starting the sentence with “I HATE…” — to poynter@sree.net (with your name and affiliation).
I HATE… “newspaper websites that don’t list the city and state of the newspaper! This should be on every page at a site. Sometimes I come across a site that even after following links to numerous places — such as ‘contact’ pages or ‘about us’ pages — I cannot tell which city and state the newspaper is based in.” – Mark Curry
I HATE… “Subject lines in e-mail that tricks you into thinking it’s one subject and turns out to be spam or porno.” – David Akerley, who runs CyberPaperboy.com
Related issues: I keep telling folks to be very specific in their subject lines, to avoid being confused for spam. Avoid short subject lines — especially when sending e-mail to people who don’t know you — such as “hello” or “checking in.” Also, avoid using the recipient’s first name in the subject line unless he or she knows you well. Using first names is a spammer practice.
I HATE… “websites that will not let you back out of them, such as returning to a search engine site. The only way to escape is to click out and bring up the search engine again. I make a point of never returning to these URLs.” – T. Jeff Williams, San Mateo, Calif.
I HATE… “e-mail updates services I sign up for (and sometimes pay a lot for) that then send me multiple e-mails advertising their products/services. I have to wade through all these semi-spams to find the daily or weekly update I originally signed up for. My candidate for the worst of all — WorldNetDaily.com — I get their update twice daily buried in the midst of sometimes 10 or more ads for books they sell. At least I don’t pay for those updates. Some of my paid updates are nearly as bad.” – Gretchen Passantino
I asked Joseph Farrah, editor and CEO of WorldNetDaily for a response. Here’s what he sent me: “There’s a simple solution for the complainer — remove yourself from the list. It’s as easy as it was signing up: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/resources/mailingList.asp. More than 65,000 of our subscribers seem to be quite happy to take the e-mail content — a mixture of news and advertisements, just like you get in an old-fashioned newspaper.”
I HATE… “pop-up ads!” – Lillian Kuras, publicist
[If you use a PC and Internet Explorer, one way to deal with this is to download Google Toolbar 2.0, which blocks pop-ups. See a related note about the Toolbar below.]
I HATE… “e-mail that instructs me to forward it to everyone on my list or I’ll have bad luck.” – Shirley Moskow, a freelance writer in Lexington, Mass.
In my column last week, I mentioned how much I hate long URLs and recommended SnipURL as a way to shorten links. Several of you had comments about that.
Anne Hennegar writes: “One comment for your readers is that the ‘Snip This’ link from SnipURL and the Google Toolbar don’t agree. The Google Toolbar will suppress the SNIP THIS pop up unless the user holds down the CTRL key while clicking on ‘Snip This.'”
Anne’s right and I should have pointed it out. The “Snip This” link launches a pop-up, so you need to do as she advises if you use the very valuable Google Toolbar.
I had asked about SnipURL’s Mac compatibility. Cynthia Kondratieff of Dolphin Multimedia writes: “Snip URL works fine on the Mac (at least in OS 9.2.2 with IE 5.1) and I like the fact that you can determine your own URL by putting it in the ‘nickname’ field.”
Mark Van Patten of the Daily News in Bowling Green, Ky., reports that he uses a Mac G4 with IE5, and it “worked hunky-dory. I’ll use this when someone asks me for a specific story out of our archives and is having trouble finding it. Cutting and pasting this — http://snurl.com/2d5c — is sure a lot easier than this — http://www.bgdailynews.com/cgi-bin/view.cgi?/200309/16+cts20030916_top-feature.html+20030916+top-feature.
Your turn: What do you hate? Let me know at poynter@sree.net.
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