Responsible reporting (or, sorry for being a doos, ClickThinking)

brad — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 03:23:27 +0200

Yesterday I posted about how a local web company recently sold the work of a well known, local, independent web professional. What they did broke netiquette, ethics, and definitely copyright law. Much geek froth and outrage occurred, and a tiny storm broke out on the internet. I jumped on the bandwagon with my post because:

I have SIWOTI syndrome
Content climbs higher on google when lots of reputable sources link to what is considered to be definitive text. Whijo is considered to be somewhat of a reputable source by google, and because I use the best CMS on the internet google likes reading what I am writing, so I wanted to contribute to improving Coda's rank on google for this subject
My goal is to improve the quality of the South African web, and improvement/evolution comes when the economy/environment favours better products, and denounces poor product. I denounced poor product

The only problem is that sometimes success quickly exceeds expectation, and in this case, after google crawled whijo.net, my article (then entitled 'Do not use the services of ClickThinking') landed on the first page of results. Coda's much more democratic 'What were you thinking, ClickThinking?' reached higher on the first page of results, as it should have. So, geek-google-penis aside, the weight of what I had done (measured in the internet based ISO standard of LOLCATS, or Lc) struck me. I know it is all a storm in a tea cup, but a post with a title as venomous as that sticks around, and ultimately may take business from them (and I am in no position to decide if their poor form deserves to take business away from them). I had behaved like a Journalist (well, one who didn't do too well in the media and ethics course). I thought up a catchy headline, and published it with a self-congratulatory click. I guess it comes back to thinking before doing, and not being a turd on the internet. So I changed the title, and when the site is re-crawled it will have a new title which is a lot closer to the heart of the matter at hand, and a lot less sensationalist.

Sometimes my powerful Sense For Injustice conspires with my Sense For Bad Web Development, and I peak too soon, type before I think, and end up looking childish, and not accomplishing my goals. I am usually calm and rational, but some things short circuit over that calm, rational, ethical brain. So, in summation, I apologise to ClickThinking for going too far off the handle, but I still deplore what they did.

As an aside, should I really be able to get into the first page of results on google for a company that just won a web analytics award?

Bad move, ClickThinking

brad — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 13:30:40 +0200

I was excited this morning when I read on Green Cars about Optimal energy's re-designed website. They recently launched their electric car the 'Joule'. Except when I clicked through to the optimal energy site it looked awfully familiar. Apparently this didn't escape Damien Du Toit (the owner of the coda identity). Apparently the background image is a direct copy paste probably even ends up as the same hash.

It is completely despicable, unethical, immoral. I am sure optimal energy are unaware of what ClickThinking did, but I hope they get wind of it.

I suppose it should be unsurprising that ClickThinking also uses javascript to add onclick events to their 'navbar' made of div's, instead of, I dunno, anchors? Is HTML still HTML if you don't actually make use of anchors?

UPDATE: Based on the comments below and re-reading the above paragraph, I realise it is not clear that when I rip into the JS menu I am talking about the JS menu on ClickThinking, not the menu on Optimal Energy site

UPDATE: Changed the title of the post to be less venomous. Was "Do not use the services of ClickThinking".