Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: The best site?
Author: Brian Sugrue Posted: 11/8/2000; 10:03:04 AM Topic: The best site? Msg #: 21959 (In response to 21956) Prev/Next: 21958 / 21960 Yahoo. By far.
Reason: Consistency. Their state-by-state results never failed to be the only online source I could find that 1) was always ahead of the TV networks and 2) consistently serving pages.
Technical: While "new media" leaders like Drudge and E-vote could not handle the traffic (this is something online news sources will have to figure out...for a while I just gave up and watched cable TV after several high-profile election sites could not do the job - Channel 34 doesn't care if 1 or 1,000,000 are watching). Yahoo was also not afraid to gather and display almost immediately relevant external links to other news outlets. I'm sure other sites also had good real-time results and provided good external links. I didn't see anyone put the package together better than Yahoo.
User interface: Great. No clutter, just the information I wanted. Two clicks from the front page of Yahoo, I could watch the Florida returns as new precincts reported while TV news spun their wheels covering for embarrassing exit poll failures and other online sites (including Florida's own state govt site) crashed. A map was not as easily found, but I can count to 270 and kept up with that well enough through TV outlets.
One final comment: this may be a new medium, but those who have mastered TV news (esp. CNN and ABC) also had some of the better web coverage. Yahoo was one of the few redeeming sites for the web-based outlets.
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