Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Sexy vs informative

If it's looks vs smarts on the interwebs, it becomes a matter of front end and back end. The front end needs to look good. The back end needs to be smart. If you can create a site with just one end that's both smart and good-looking, you win.

That's my problem with the Internet Archive. It may be one of the smartest resources on the net, but it looks as dry as dust. Look at this. It's obviously a music archive, but you have to go way down below the fold to see things like the Grateful Dead, Apollo Sunshine, Flux Capacitor and Jerry Joseph and the Jackmormons (a group we are not necessarily endorsing, having never heard them, but we do like their name), Now look at this. The organization's blog is sexy looking, with artist logos and a picture of Garcia and Lesh and the gang (who started the whole live taping thing) going at it in performance. This archive is obviously an amazing source of music, all of it free (provided you don't go trying to make money off of it). We should all be diving into this over and over.

If only it had a sexy front end...

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