In Soviet Union, News Sites View You

Good Example: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/ - I don’t know if this is a news website or not, but it’s pretty much a database of movie reviews, which appear in newspapers. So I guess it somewhat applies. The main purpose of the site is to gather as many reviews of a certain movie as it can and give it a percentage rating based on how favorable the reviews are. For example, Casino Royale has 163 positive reviews and 10 negative reviews out of the critics polled, giving it a 94 percent.

What I like most about the site is that the home page has a lot of information on it but it is well-organized and presented, so it’s not intimidating. It has new releases and the box office top-grossers for the week in the left margin, so people can identify what new movies are coming out and see what, on the whole, the critics are saying about it. The home page also has features written by the site’s staff and, while I don’t usually read them, it’s refreshing to know the site produces original material.

Once you’ve clicked onto a movie’s page, it shows excerpts from critics’ reviews and links to the full reviews. I like this because if you find a critic with a movie taste akin to yours, which is rare, you can easily follow his reviews through this feature. The movie pages also have a “cream of the crop” section that collects reviews from a selection of critics from major publications, so you can see how their opinions agree or differ from less prestigious critics.

Bad Example: http://www.buzzflash.com/ - This is a news collection database with a (severe) liberal slant. I’m not a frequenter of the site, but when I mentioned this assignment to a friend, this is the first thing that popped into his head in the “bad” file. And oh…my…God.

First of all, the home page hurts my eyes. It is a stark white background with an endless sea of links to stories, all in black bold type and underlined and with oranges and reds thrown in every now and then for good measure. It’s basically impossible to tell one story from the next without close inspection. Except the main headline, which screams at you from above the site’s logo, still in the same type but a lot bigger. The titles of the links more often than not have little asides that are just annoying. Here’s a taste: On a Yahoo News piece called, “Iran says it’s set to help U.S. on Iraq,” the BuzzFlash addition is “Ain’t That Ironic.” This doesn’t seem clever or cute to me, just distracting.

Once you’ve clicked onto a link, the interface is fine. But it’s so hard to get to that point that I can’t see anyone being able to interact with it for more than a short period of time.