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April 17, 2004
Sci-Fi sites trapped in the past
Amidst all the hoo haa of the Hugo nominations the BSFA awards seemed to go a bit unnoticed. It took a few days (seemed like weeks in the blogosphere) before the news seeped through, mainly due to a mention on the SFWA site, although Locus also mentioned it. A quick shout at Locus, get a RSS feed for your news (or ATOM if you prefer). Why didn't the awards page on the BSFA site send out the news like a flare into the blogopolis?
Don't know, but I'll tell you one thing the BSFA site is trapped in the last century, a truly awful looking site with a star field background and everything. SF is supposed to be about the future, what's going on? And it doesn't stop there there's a whole swathe of SF sites that look, well, rubbish. The SFWA site has content but looks like something I'd have viewed in Mosaic. Now at this point you may be thinking "Who are you to criticise these sites?" Well that may be a good point, but I know what I like and I know what feels like now. I like the freshness of Typepad blogs. I like the quick skinning afforded by CSS, as shown in CSS Zen Garden. I like The Alien Online, one of the few SF sites I've found that looks cool. I even like SciFi.Com which, although busy, looks quite good. So a final call to all SF sites, start looking like the future. Please.