Microchips Here and There
I had turned into quite the regular visitor of the whole Gawker Media family of sites, especially io9 (ostensibly their science-fiction blog, but really a catch-all site for whatever they feel like posting), over the past couple of years--enough that I was a "starred commenter" on some of them (which gives your comments more prominence, along with some other features).
However, all of them recently went through a redesign blatantly aimed at facilitating advertising and thus revenue generation at the expense of the user experience, leaving the sites all but unusable (especially when I'm away from home and have to access them using an older browser). Some workarounds have surfaced--the so-called "Canadian Version" of a Gawker site looks like it used to (for the moment), and older browsers now get redirected to the scaled-down mobile version of a site.
Both lampbane and I were similarly frustrated by this, so I responded to her complaint about it on Twitter with an idle tweet of my own. I didn't think much of it, especially since I've been too busy lately to do much of anything online...
...so naturally, my reply ended up being quoted in a TechCrunch article on the subject. :}
I don't read TechCrunch all that often (although they've covered my friends at Regator before), but that was quite the pleasant and unexpected surprise--as was the flood of retweets, replies, and new followers I received after the article showed up.
Clearly, my previous strategy of posting frequent, thoughtful, and/or witty content on Twitter was (as with so many things online) the wrong way to go about getting noticed. ;)
However, all of them recently went through a redesign blatantly aimed at facilitating advertising and thus revenue generation at the expense of the user experience, leaving the sites all but unusable (especially when I'm away from home and have to access them using an older browser). Some workarounds have surfaced--the so-called "Canadian Version" of a Gawker site looks like it used to (for the moment), and older browsers now get redirected to the scaled-down mobile version of a site.
Both lampbane and I were similarly frustrated by this, so I responded to her complaint about it on Twitter with an idle tweet of my own. I didn't think much of it, especially since I've been too busy lately to do much of anything online...
...so naturally, my reply ended up being quoted in a TechCrunch article on the subject. :}
I don't read TechCrunch all that often (although they've covered my friends at Regator before), but that was quite the pleasant and unexpected surprise--as was the flood of retweets, replies, and new followers I received after the article showed up.
Clearly, my previous strategy of posting frequent, thoughtful, and/or witty content on Twitter was (as with so many things online) the wrong way to go about getting noticed. ;)