So innergeek.us has been named the number 88 of the "World's 100 Worst Websites" by Micromart magazine http://www.micromart.co.uk in the UK. This is how the article starts:

The World's Worst 100 Websites

After his recent trip around the world in 80 websites, Ashley Frieze was quickly talked out of his vow never to do it again. Here are the first 50 of his list of the World's Worst 100 Websites...

The World

What makes a website bad? To get some clues, I went onto the Internet in search of Tim Berners-Lee's original vision (available somewhere inside www.w3c.org). His aim was for:

* Easy to find information with rich, cross system, links
* Ease of use and accessibility
* Usefulness

So, any website which is the opposite of these is clearly bad. I devised a scoring system (described at worldsworst100.blogspot.com, which also contains all the links to the sites in this article and the next). I then started Googling for anything and everything.

The list of sites which follows is the result of a large, but not exhaustive search. Some of these sites are so bad they're good. Some are archetypes of the sort of site that litters the net and wastes server space and bandwidth every hour of every day. Sites were scored in:

* Uselessness
* Bad design
* Wasted effort
* Timewaster potential
* Smugness

Given the diversity of the Internet, and how easy it is for any idiot to set up a website, the results of this narrow-minded scoring system are bound to be very subjective. Entertainment does not count as useful, for instance and some people's strongly-held beliefs can come across as smug. So, this list will tell us something about the web, but who knows what it is!?

***************

On their website, they list numbers 100-91 so that you will purchase the magazine to read the rest. I am very interested in seeing what they have to say about innergeek.us, especially since their site isn't exactly a pillar of awesome design and usefulness. I just don't want to give them any money for a magazine that disses my website, whether or not it's justified. If anybody has a copy of the article that they could scan and send to me, I would greatly appreciate it.

I really wonder what hangup that writer (who, talk about useless, made blog specifically for this article: http://worldsworst100.blogspot.com) has about geeks and wasting time.

Who is Ashley Frieze to decide what is a time-waster, anyway? And why do guys named Ashley not go by something cool, like "Ash," instead? What kind of guy disses geeks who has a personal website named http://www.incredible.org.uk/ that even has a link to a page called "incredible geek?" Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Maybe Ashley should have taken his personal website out of search engine indexes before resorting to public, published defamation of other people's more useful websites.

It's not my fault that he wasn't geek enouch to score well on the Geek Test.

(Thanks to David McCann for the tip about the Micromart article.)

Comments

Hi there,

Yes, I listed your site 88th. However, since you didn't read the review, you should have, perhaps, have reserved judgement over whether this was a bad thing.

Part of what makes a website bad, according to my article, can also be what makes it well worth visiting and enjoying. Let's be honest, being a geek has both negative and positive connotations. I'm a computer programmer and contributor to a computer magazine. I'm clearly a geek. I like Sci-Fi TV programmes and I have written programs in binary.

Conversely, I would also like to think that there's a world away from the computer screen and that aspiring to be the uncommunicative, studious-but-poorly-social-skilled character is probably not a good thing. So, I both celebrate my geekiness and also look at it with some sense of perspective. Being non-geeky is good too... right?

My own website would probably have gone into my World's Worst 100 list, according to my own scoring system, and the limited review I was able to do of the world's websites. However, I don't write in Micro Mart to publicise my own site. Instead, I write in order to be able to give readers some enjoyment. Hopefully, people went along and explored your site and enjoyed it for what it is. I hope you continue to provide the service you provide and I apologise if you have taken offence at what was a light-hearted article.

Contact me at ashley-at-incredible.org.uk if you would like to discuss this further.

Posted by: ash | July 22, 2006 03:02 PM

While it's true that being a geek has both positive and negative connotations in our society, I do feel strongly that there is also QUITE enough negative emphasis on the label! I appreciate innergeek.us for the unabashedly positive spin that Yvette places on geekdom. From the huge response that Yvette has received from many geeks on the web, it seems clear that others have also appreciated the need for a positive perspective on being a geek.

Therefore, I congratulate Yvette (who, by the way, blends seamlessly into "normal society"... you'd be shocked!) for the bravery to embrace her Inner Geek and encourage others to do the same!

(emoticon smiley)
Monique

Posted by: Monique | May 24, 2008 12:36 PM