Thursday, January 25, 2007

Get the Led Out

I’ve spent the last few months at work coaxing a high-level project into fruition. It’s my brainchild, my baby, my precioussss. If all goes according to plan, it will improve my site’s performance on the search engines, and could potentially be used as one model for our digital environment moving forward.

It might not be the prettiest project out there, but it was perfect in its utilitarian functionality. There’s plenty of pretty Flash-driven, Java-laden content on the web, but as a user, and as someone who works in technology, at the end of the day, I could give a damn how pretty a page is if it doesn’t tell me what I want to know. If I’m looking for something, I want to find it, not spend 45 seconds waiting for your elaborate Flash animation to load and wow me with its blazing glory. Content is only useful to me if it’s clear, easy to navigate, and free from unnecessary bells and whistles.

My Project had nary a bell or a whistle. It’s what I think of as Good Internet: it fulfills a need, it’s optimized to come up in search, and its navigation could not be simpler.

But, because it’s being built for my Big Media Company, it had to be, in corporate-speak, monetized. We had to place ads on it, and allow the pages to be sponsored to generate revenue.

My baby is now shilling for The Man. What was once pure and unadulterated HTML, virginal hyperlinks, and optimized copy now has “This page brought to you by . . .” plopped on the top. There’s a massive sponsor ad right in the middle (above the fold, thank you!), and Yahoo! urges you to buy, buy, buy across the bottom.

I was bitching to Jenny about the Frankenstein-esque transformation my project has undergone, from noble link list to monster of capitalism. Jenny thought for a moment, then said, “It’s like the first time you see the commercial for Cadillac with the Led Zeppelin music.”

It is exactly like that, to me. The almighty dollar has to be the bottom line for any successful business, but that doesn’t make it any less depressing.

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