Confuzmodo: How NOT To Write An Article Including Videos

Gizmodo says Fake Steve Jobs Rips CNBC a new one??!?! Wow, what an interesting sounding article. Let’s see what it’s about.

Unfortunately, all mention of Dan Lyons, who played Steve Jobs on the Interwebs, disappears completely after the first paragraph of the article. And it’s only alluded to there at all after an “UPDATE”.

The entire text of the article talks about how Jim Goldman is a bad reporter and didn’t tell everyone about something or other regarding Steve Jobs and how he’s maybe dying which you should all STFU about anyway because dying SUCKS so leave him alone whether he is or not. But Fake Steve? No, you have to watch the embedded videos to know what the hell they’re talking about in that aspect.

Now, it’s not too unreasonable to ask someone to watch a video to understand what you’re talking about in a post. It’s rather unreasonable to require someone to watch a video to understand what you’re talking about in a post and NOT ASK THAT IT HAPPEN.

Nowhere in the text of the article is there a reference to “the included video shows Fake Steve Jobs saying blah blah blah.” This is not very useful to people who would like to actually read your article as opposed to mindlessly clicking on a video which will have to load and be watched in the same page without switching to their IM window in the middle or whatever when they don’t even know if it’s worth watching based on the subject matter.

Also it’s extremely confusing for iPhone users. Gizmodo loves the iPhone; they give it its own gigantic section of App Love. So why are they writing an article which relies on video embedded with the Flash that the iPhone still doesn’t have?

Bad Gizmodo.