Techland does something right

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Caturday must’ve been in full force this weekend, because Time’s Most Popular list has not one but three titles with a feline focus. Awestruck by the idea that several people at Time decided that “Dead Sex Kittens” was an appropriate title for a triple obituary (or really anything besides the most sordid of snuff films), I fled to Techland for refuge.

Thanks, guys

Techies, not surprisingly, can be relied upon to use the internet correctly. Thanks to this truism, Techland is the only part of Time.com that’s attractively put together and user friendly. This has been accomplished by doing away with all of Time’s aesthetic decisions except the navigation bar at the top and replacing it with a pleasing blue-black color scheme, sans serif font, wider spread, organized headlines, eye-catching top content, and constantly updating news feeds and Twitter feeds.

As an added bonus, the content on Techland is well-reported and covers things that people interested in technology might reasonably be expected to care about, whether it’s new gadgets, tech culture, or viral videos.

In the spirit of competition, I thought I’d take a look at a feature listing the Top 10 Consumer Tech Rivalries and compare it with the grindhouse trainwreck that is the aforementioned Dead Sex Kittens post on Time’s main site.

Doug Aamath could've been a contender

Hide yo cats, hide yo wife

The Techland feature cycles through ten tech rivalries, from the beloved old school duel of Nintendo vs Sega to the useful Internet Explorer vs Firefox vs Chrome vs Safari to the contentious PC vs Mac.

• Each rivalry is featured on its own page
• Each page features a snarky recap of the rivalry, and though it doesn’t stipulate who won, an intuitively Comments box could invite users to debate this themselves.
• Each page opens with a relevant YouTube video which is streamable without navigating away
• Techland has figured out hyperlinks.

The Time.com main content feature discusses three recently deceased movie stars (Maria Schneider, Lena Nyman,  and Tura Satana), the movies they starred in, and their significance within the context of their time and erotic cinema as a whole.

• The article focuses primarily on each actress’s most well-known film, their directors, and their famously lurid content. There is little analysis or information about the women’s lives outside of the films and a brief nod to Schneider’s feelings of being exploited is the only time the article attempts to look at things from the perspective of the actresses themselves. This would be fine except that the headline implies that the focus is on the women themselves. Objectifying women posthumously should be offensive enough, but in accordance with the rest of Time.com, the article is also poorly presented.
• The feature consists of an introduction and three sections and is spread over four pages. However, instead of breaking these up accordingly (like the Techland feature), the content runs together and is broken up haphazardly.
• Only two of the women featured get photos within their sections. (Shneider’s is at the top, which apparently means she does not get one when her name is actually mentioned.) Within the first two sections, the photos are found one paragraph down and are awkwardly sized, not covering the full width of the column.
• Instead of hyperlinks worked into the text there are awkwardly placed links to content which could be relevant (but is actually just distracting).

Final verdict’s apparent faster than you can say “revenge of the nerds:” Techland > Time.com main content, Doug Aamoth > Richard Corliss, live cute kittens > dead sex kittens, and Sega Genesis > NES. No contest.