Never Did No Wanderin' After All.

So check this out. My cousin finally has music on his MySpace page...

Fuck, I hate MySpace. No matter what content you plan on having up there, it's not possible to make a page that doesn't look like a squirrel ate the internet, then ate a copy of Vampire Hunter D, then ate Smartfood, then threw up on your monitor. I haven't tried to make a page, and probably won't so we won't really know. To be fair, Andrew's band's page looks pretty good because they didn't really try to do anything --and aren't twelve years old-- , and Joel's looks cool because there isn't really anything on it.

But then you scroll down.

Anyone can leave stupid comments, and their picture. And none of those pictures look good. And all the comments are bad internet english, and they all say, "Hey, thanks for adding me to your friends list. I just added you to my friends list, and I just wanted to drop in and show you some love" or some shit like that. And it all adds up and stays there, so soon you have a page that's four miles long, and takes three minutes to load (on broadband; who knows how long on dialup) and... god help you if you click on one of those friends. Probably you'll wind up on some giggling retard's homage to Jem and The Holograms, and it'll have one of those retina-raping animated backgrounds.

Wait.

I have a theory. Let's attempt to solve for W, the overall value of a website. If C stands for the actual content of a given web site, and P stands for the perceived content, and E stands for the effort involved in creating the site yourself, while $ stands for the money spent on having someone who knows what they're doing do it for you...


W= ($+C)-2PE

So, the overall value of any website is a function of the money paid for it added to the actual content, and subtracting double the product of the perceived front-page content multiplied by any involvement you had in it personally beyond asking for a web page and signing a cheque.

So, if you take an average quality web site, and don't pay any money for it (like all of myspace), slap all the content on the front page and do it yourself, while having nothing really interesting to say, you wind up with this.

But if you take a cute little flash animation, made by someone who's good at it, and attractive, functional buttons that tell you what you want to know and then take you there, and then have massive amounts of organized content in small, screen-sized bites, and access to older content with a reasonably intuitive interface, you get this.

Sorry to use that; I know it's old news and isn't the cult gem it was four years ago, but it's a good example of a well-laid-out site.

Anyway, where was I?

Oh, yeah, don't use MySpace. Unless you're a friend of mine who already uses it, in which case, um, okay.

And speaking of MySpace, go check out my cousin's band there. He's the drummer, Adam.

Right, then.