even more surprising to me last night was the absolute lack of online coverage of the state of the union at the politico site (and pretty much everywhere else for that matter). to launch on the day of the speech, which is something like the superbowl of washington press events, and do nothing on the site after all the lipservice given to being a super converged web site that reverse publishes the print edition is giant disappointment. with the a-list that they have in the newsroom, that no one even liveblogged the speech or did online reax and analysis shocks me to no end. so much so, in fact, i may have to do one of my nearly infamous rant posts.

Are they delaying that until the print editions hit the streets, by any chance? If so, that’s no way to do things…

The Politico’s HTML is littered with misused elements, and comes close to generating 500 validation errors!

But the worst sin is that they probably don’t realize what they’ve given up in using this mess. A higher search engine ranking, reduced bandwidth costs, faster load times for users, and the ability for disabled users to read their content must not have been priorities.

By reducing their star-studded staff by one, or perhaps even less (someone could work part-time), the Politico could have invested enough into their Web design to produce something far more usable.

Instead they’ve fallen into the Web site wasteland already littered with many other media organizations that don’t realize what’s underneath the words also counts.

And, I would’ve coded-in a Google Map overview of the “Big I” (Interchange) in Albuquerque, but the thing apparently doesn’t like equal signs in the url.

Again, thanks.