Like every other OMGWEB2.0WE’RE S000K001!!!111 media website around, Cyberpresse has added those dreaded share links to the bottom of every story. You know, the ones you click on and, through the magic of URL variables brings you directly to a del.icio.us bookmark-save page, Fark submission page or prefabricated Facebook post.
These things really annoy me for a few reasons:
- They’re entirely unnecessary. I already have a bookmarklet to save pages to del.icio.us. For any other purpose, it’s simple to copy the URL and paste it where needed.
- There are far too many of these. Del.icio.us, Digg, Fark, Slashdot, MySpace, Facebook, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Furl, etc. There are so many, in fact, that other services have been created to be the middleman and make sure they’re all supported. If you’re not using one of the top three services, you’re not going to find those links on all pages, and so you have to find an alternative, and so #1 comes back into play.
- They’re ugly.
This unnecessary help doesn’t end there. Cyberpresse, like many of its bretheren, also has plenty of other buttons and links that pointlessly duplicate existing browser functions, badly.
- Text size: Toggles between only three sizes (the default is the smallest). Changes only the article text, not the text of other type on the page.
- Print: Normally, you’d expect this to provide a specially-formatted print-friendly version of the article. No, instead it just calls the print function through Javascript. Oh, and there is no specially-formatted print-friendly version, so you get the background image, navigation, headers and footers, and all the ads.
It’s all just a waste of HTML, much like everything else on the page that’s not the article I want to read.
Meanwhile, their entirely Flash-based video site provides no way whatsoever to share links to individual videos. I can’t bookmark them, send them as emails, save them to social networking sites, or post them to blogs.
Maybe you should start working on that instead?
I like the share links but agree that there are too many networks so too many buttons. I recently started using Digg and I love it. I would say that the share buttons should be bigger and easier to find because on alot of sites they are not, if they have them at all.
Un petit peu chialeux sur ce post-ci ne trouves-tu pas?
Knowing the number of people working at cyberpresse (30) they are using modules that are built by others …
So it is Stream the world that are doing the video platform …
If you have better solution, I am sure they would be interested in knowing them!
They could put their videos on YouTube, where they can be linked to and embedded.
Print-friendly pages could be developed with print stylesheets (I have one on this blog, it’s not that hard)
A cleanup of busy navigation sections would help quite a bit as well.
Any other solutions I can suggest?
Putting video on youtube is not a solution to be able to put ads on it …
simple solution for a blogger, not a solution for cyberpresse.
Putting your content on youtube means you are giving the rights of that content to google …
Aint a solution at all ..
For your print solution … it is easy cause you are using wordpress … the CMS they must be using is much more complicated than using wordpress …
Easy to compare your blog to cyberpresse … another thing to understand the complexity of putting content of different sources on a site …
Like i said … propose real solution and they will be pleased to understand them!
ah et en passant, je ne les défends pas … j’essaie juste de te faire comprendre que tes critiques ne tiennent pas compte de leurs réalités :D
I agree with you on that one Fagstein. They’re often not needed, and they’re simply ugly.
And any new system needs a button, hence new pollution in many of the world’s blogs. Plugins for these kinds of things should go in the reader’s browser, and not in the page. Cyberpresse doesn’t have to care who uses which services to bookmark/submit their stories. I can’t believe someone who really wouldn’t bookmark a noteworthy story because there’s no link to it made easy.
I remember a blog which had 40 (FORTY!!) of those small “link to me in %^$” links. the blog was pretty much nothing I’d like to link to, and the guy only have 1-2 comments per post, max.