July 2003
INTERNET BUGS
The Internet is certainly not perfect. It has grown from its infancy in the mid-1990s to the present day where Microsoft even contemplates the "iLoo" - the first ever Internet equipped portable toilet. The Internet is perfect for finding a phone number or a recipe or the latest news. But to enjoy its strengths you have to wade through its weaknesses - the stuff that is just plain irritating.
Email is the best and the worst. Junk mailers have adopted it as their method of choice and SPAM - unsolicited email - clogs everyone's mailbox. About 10 billion emails per day (30% of the total email traffic) are considered SPAM. Then there are the 'forwarded' jokes, stories, and poems. Worse yet, you open the email only to find the actual content is buried within attachments within attachments. If you are one of the "senders", as a courtesy, cut and paste the content into a new email to eliminate all the extra junk.
Popup ads are the next worst. Have you been browsing when suddenly another smaller window opened by itself, only to reveal a casino, a pesky little spycam or an annoying survey that will win you $10,000? Sometimes closing the popup will simply spawn another popup to lure you into an endless cycle. Advertisers continue to use SPAM and popup ads because some people always respond. If we all quit responding maybe they will stop.
Having a slow connection with a dialup modem has plagued us all. Waiting for a web page to load can be painful. Eventually we will all have access to and be able to afford broadband connections, but for now you will have to find sites that are easy to download. If you manage your own web site, remember most of your visitors will still be using a dialup modem. Keep your site designed so it loads quickly.
Flashing animations are popular, but can be distracting. It is hard to concentrate and read an article when there is a flashing monkey or a bright blinking green box. Motion on a web page can be useful for drawing attention to particular content, but can easily be overused.
So go out and enjoy what the Internet offers - and eventually we should figure out how to avoid the irritants.
-Doug DeVries
Equine-Design.com
doug@equine-design.com
