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Thursday 12 May 2005

Request for review [Lurks]

I get some amusing review requests for the computer products that my company makes but today took the biscuit. This chap claiming to be the 'senior editor' of Race The Dream called me up.

"Do you do reviews?" he mumbles.
"What?"
"Do you do reviews of your laptops?"
"Er well not us but various publications have done..."
"Right. I'm from a web site and I wonder if your criteria is large volumes of traffic."
"Well, er, yeah that would be a start. Who are you, what do you want?"


Honestly it's like someone from nursing home had called, baffled by this modern telephone thing. So I get the chap to email me and that gets me to the web site above. This crowd basically flog you a picture of a nice car for £100 and this gets you the chance to win it. The web site is bad, I mean super bad.
But wait! It has a reviews section! I have to point it out because you might miss it. It's here. Check out the magnificent review of the Vanqish (sic). Quite why it's a good idea to do some super bad layout that looks like it was done on a covermounted Atari ST DTP package and then output the entire thing to one large image... well, let's just not go there mmkay? I'd hate to meet the junior editor...
Still, putting a positive spin on this: The web is a very special place. It's the New Economy where barely sentient lifeforms are free to ferret out their livings via increasingly innovative, if baffle, ways. Thereby relieving the burden on the state to support twitching and the drooling of society.
Right, now I think I'm off to buy a £100 photo on the basis that I might win the car. Yeeesss.

3 comments:

  1. Amusingly I had an explanation for the entire review pages as images:

    We recently made changes to the website, and decided on graphic images as we have more control over the design decisions, layout and style as opposed to an html setup. We have a statistics package informing us of the amount of people logging on, from which country, the length and time spent etc. Our marketing approach is not just based on directing as much internet traffic as possible, we like to take a much more focused approach.

    If only other web sites were so diligent, they'd come up with genius ideas like this as well.

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  2. Please note punters that you will only be entered into the aforementioned prize draw after all prints are sold. In essence, given how abysmally shite these prints are, the prize draw will never be held. One might assume the owners of the site don't actually have a Mercedes S class to give away!This one is a gem - can you spot the crappy Photoshop or other editing job? I can; and I'm not about to fork over £95 for something I can Google for. I don't suggest you do either.I particularly enjoyed the Nokia review (don't quite know why it is there, in HUGE JPEG GLORY but never mind). The opening line is a stunner:"There was once a time when NASA used computing power the size of an Elephant to launch man into space and beyond to the moon"I've had to manually type that out of course, because its an image (!) rather than live-text, but the rest of the review brings a tear to my eyeI really can't decide if this site is an attempted rip-off merchant who hasn't got the skillz to do anything remotely convincing, or someone who thinks they are genuinely onto a good thing...

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  3. I looked into it and basically it appears to purport what is defined as a lottery. There are very strict laws concerning this sort of thing and you have to fit into a number of exception areas. These guys don't but if they did; if it was less than £20,000 they have to register with the local council. If it's over, and it is, then it has to be with the gaming board. Chances of that?
    I dunno, let's see. I've just emailed them :-)

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