General

I know companies need to make money to keep the web free. I know that trying things out is a great way to see if they work. With all that said, what cnn.com is trying now is potentially the stupidest revenue-generating idea I've seen on the web since...well, perhaps forever.

As of this morning, at least, when you load the US edition of cnn.com, there's a new icon on some of the stories in the Latest News section:

Click on one of those little t-shirt icons, and you're taken to a page where you can...you guessed it (or maybe you didn't!)...order a t-shirt showing simply the headline you clicked on, the date and time of the story, and a tag line that reads "I just saw it on cnn.com." In case CNN comes to their senses in the next few minutes, I made a screenshot of the preview/ordering page.

I just don't get it--someone at cnn.com really thinks there's a huge untapped revenue stream for this kind of thing? I can almost imagine the executive-level discussion that occurred over this...

'We need to make more money off our web site. Anyone got any ideas?'
"Hey, I bet there are millions of people out there that are just dying to walk around in a bland black, white, or grey t-shirt showing a headline off our site!"
'Jane, that sounds like an excellent idea! Run with it!'

I don't know about you, but I can think of about, oh, ten million things I'd buy before I got around to ordering a cnn.com headlines t-shirt...but who knows, maybe such things are indeed hip in the world of news geeks?

(AdWeek has the details on this new promo...even after reading that article, though, I still think this is one of the stupidest ideas I've ever seen on the web. Beyond stupidity, there's an entire debate about the ethics of this concept, too--headline writers are now basically tied directly to revenue generation, as CNN will be able to track which headlines generate the most revenue. What I learned in school was that revenue generating activities should always be separate from the editorial activities of a publication, including its web site. I think this holds doubly true if you happen to be a news site, where you should be held to the highest ethical standards.)

I've been spending a lot of time using Firefox 3.0b5, and I'm generally thrilled with the browser (think Camino's look and feel (mostly), plus full support for Firefox extensions and Safari's speed). It works so well most of the time that I forget it's a beta.

Then there are times like this morning, when I saw this screen:

That came up when I tried to report a non-functional site--one that loaded fine in Safari, but wouldn't load at all in Firefox. It's things like this that make me remember I'm using beta software :). (Even worse than the blank privacy policy, though, was the fact that checking the box and clicking the "Done" button didn't then let me report the site.)

Today, while trying to register on a web site to download a public beta of some software package, I received the following very helpful error message:

Hmm...I'll get right on that, whatever it might have been. (The eventual solution was to use a different page on the vendor's site to complete what seemed to be an identical form. For whatever reason, it worked there, but not where I was trying to do it.)