Blog Designs On Crack

Pittstop Works recently talked about a 'blog war' where a south Vietnamese trash talked about her Hanoi vacation. It apparently caused northern Vietnamese to come to their fair city's defense. Pittstop cited this article which discussed it, and which also demonstrates the low barrier to entry for journalism these days.

How could one write a piece talking about a blog posting and the response it produced without providing information about the source material? What's the blog address, so folks can see what the fuss is all about themselves? That's as useful as writing a book review and failing to tell me the author, much less the title of the book. Ridiculous.

A quick Google suggested that the seminal post (and the comments attached thereto) was removed by the author. HanoiMark, in a comment on Noodlepie, said that he couldn't really find anything of the original text causing the hubbub.

While the original blog may be down, this blog post, on Yahoo 360 in Vietnamese, titled (translated) "An Article about Fucking Ha Loi" seems to quote the original and provides a retort.

Of course, I could be wrong about that because at this point I don't read Vietnamese all that well and the god awful page design does not help. I'm not trying to pick on this girl, because a whole lot of Yahoo 360 blogs are downright unreadable due to design issues.

And this isn't some sort of Yahoo 360, 'dem darn furriners' thing either - Myspace is equally a painful visual experience. What's with these kids and their layout choices? Who sets black text on a black background, or light pastel text on a white background?

Is this the visual equivalent to those high pitched teenaged ring tones - only kids can divine the textual info from that morass? With the advent of click-and-drag layout designs, there seems to be more unusable site out there than when folks coded HTML by hand. Progress, indeed.