I don’t know what it is, but it seems like the weather becomes more and more important to a man as he grows older. We know roughly when the weather is coming on the local news shows, and we can readily change from Channel A to Channel B in time to catch the weather on both networks. Then we contrast and compare.
Channel A never calls for rain or snow. Channel B always acts like any form of precipitation will instigate Armageddon in the city. Channel C just hired a really pretty lady to act as their weather reporter, so we might flip over there and see what’s going on. Hey, we’re men. Unless we’re of an alternative lifestyle then it’s kinda what we do.
We’ll watch the Weather Channel for long blocks of time, even though we’ve already seen the local forecast. Weather Channel, at one time, had taken the pretty-lady-weather-reporter idea and multiplied it by a thousand. I don’t know if they still do, as now that I have U-Verse, the Weather Channel has become this interactive demon of television that makes it difficult even to change channels.
But my question now is this: What, in the name of all that is good and holy, has happened to Weather.com?
The Weather Channel’s website, once a bastion of information about local and regional weather, and once pretty good at forecasting said weather, is nothing but a shadow of its former self. While the page was once very informative, easy to navigate, and easy on the eyes, it is now inundated with ads, Recommended Videos, and horribly titled side-stories that are incredibly distracting. Take this picture for example. This is a screen capture I made a little after 10:00 am EST today.
Look at the titles of the videos along the top.
What March Has In Store For You! Okay, so this is a basic monthly forecast. Why is there an exclamation point on this title? Who is that excited about a single monthly forecast? Moving on…
He Thought He Was Safe. WRONG. If any video title should have an exclamation point, it’s this one. Instead, the headline writer appears to have struggled to get the title written before he yawned himself to sleep. It appears to me that the video is about a weather reporter or traffic report from some metropolitan area in the northeast US, and he’s probably going to get buried in snow kicked up by a snow plow. What does that have to do with the weather forecast?
Next Picture Even WILDER! Well, I imagine so, considering that the man and the bear in this picture are just lying on the ground. It’s hard to get less exciting than that. Again, though, what does this have to do with the forecast?
6 Months of Agony. Then DEATH! A basic understanding of punctuation would be greatly appreciated here. Also, that’s a freakin’ brown recluse spider, isn’t it?! Why? And what does the agony and death of whoever or whatever have to do with the weather?
Asteroid Headed Toward Earth Today! Okay, this is a justifiable use of an exclamation point. That said, the asteroid in question is projected to pass by just inside the moon’s orbital path, about 217,000 miles from Earth. I know that sensationalism helps to get hits on a website, but come on, man.
Honestly, I’m waiting on weather.com to post up some video title Language Professors Hate Her (if you get the reference, then you've been on the internet before). It just seems like a once respectable institution has fallen into the trap of using ploys to bring in viewers or readers.
Anyone going to the Weather Channel or to Weather.com probably already knows what they’re getting into. They’re not looking for goofy videos about snow plows and polar bears and venomous spawns of Satan. They’re looking for the forecast for their town, or for somewhere they’re going. If you guys would stop this nonsense, your website would be far more palatable for the casual user.
1 comment:
It seems they're now just another of the millions of voices yelling at you on the internet. Like my band directors used to tell us (percussion) "if they're all accents, It's not an accent anymore. You're just being loud."
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