I’m sure that VeloNews had great coverage of this years Tour de France, but I haven’t seen any of it. You see, the majority of their content was video which was tied into some viewer which refused to play in my browser. Christ! You would think it was 1996 rather then 2006. Haven’t we — and by we I mean the web design and web using population of the world — gotten past the browser version checking website?
Really smart people have spent really large amounts of time attempting to remove just this kind of fake barrier to entry, but it only takes one poor decision to make it all unravel for a given site. How much harder would it have been to be a bit more open in order to reach a larger audience? Why did they choose that particular viewer and distribution technique? Could it have been DRM?
Since I’m not the kind of person to quit just because one source decides they want to exclude me, I removed VeloNews from my reader and subscribed to the Eurosport feed. I’m happy about the change particularly because VeloNews had taken to the tactic of not putting any of the article in the feed and Eurosport treated me to a headline Stoner quickest in Laguna Seca warm-up.
Yes, it’s low rent humor; but that makes it my kind of humor.
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Yeah, even on Winblows the VN vids won’t play in Fox. Never tried it on my P-Book since I’ve been hiding in my AC’ed office lately and I’ve retreated to my Windows install on my desktop, for now….
also, have all of the TdF stages sans commercials. If you want copies just let me know.
SickBoy, your registered email bounced. Give me a scream when you get a chance.