Or rather, how not to. I saw a link on Fark to an article at TIME.com that seemed to suggest that the “average” American diner was dead. I wrongly assumed they meant the restaurant and not the person dining, so the premise seemed odd enough to me to actually read the article for a change. Diner culture is alive and well in New Hampshire, in fact diners are said to be crucial to the first-in-the-nation presidential primary. There are at least 5 “average” (ie, old-fashioned) diners within a 20 minute drive of my home, all independent local places that are not part of any national chain, all serving basic, straight-forward diner fare to mostly locals. No hipsters dining on equal slices of cherry pie and irony in these places!
The article instead is about the increasing sophistication/boredom of the American palate, moving away from meatloaf, hamburgers and mac & cheese and towards tripe like… bacon-wrapped tripe. Meh, times change, America is a huge melting pot, learn to make meatloaf yourself if The Four Seasons or Spago are no longer serving it. Then I noticed that each paragraph was followed by a link to other content within TIME’s site. Interrupting an article like that is a little odd and a bit annoying but hey, if that’s how they want to lay out their site, that’s their choice. They already have lists of other articles flanking the text for this one along with the obligatory massive Flash skyscraper ad, so why not embed even more other links in the interior content, too. You obviously don’t expect the reader to finish the entire 8.1 paragraphs anyways, so you might as well grab them while you can.
I stopped reading at the second link, “See YouTube’s 50 Best Videos.” What the heck did that have to do with anything in the preceding paragraph? It’s like some new variant of link spam. It might as well have read, “you, hey you! Don’t bother reading this article, go to this slideshow of 50 videos on YouTube and generate us some pageviews! Yoink!” The links in the paragraphs themselves were at least relevant to the article, but the links after them sure weren’t. “See a TIME video on a man cave.” Well, you did mention ‘man caves’ in the preceding paragraph, so… “See the 100 best TV shows of all time.” Uh, ok? Just because you mentioned Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason and The Love Boat, sure, show me TV Land’s upcoming schedule… “Comment on this story.” But there’s still two paragraphs left to go! Can I finish before I comment or would you like my impressions of it so far? “See Rachael Ray in Praise of Burgers and Our Culinary Tastes.” Ok, fine, I give up. Whatever point the author might have been trying to make has been sabotaged by these “calls to action” inserted in the middle. We don’t expect you to actually read this or any article, we just want you to keep on clicking. Click more. Click more now. Click. And be happy.
