FAILKeep the eye bleach handy for this one, kids. Earlier this week while scanning the Creative Loafing blogs, I noticed that food critic Brian Ries mentioned that he got a call from one Dave Hackett alerting him to the wonders of his new website gototell.com; namely, the part that allows you to search local restaurants that have been fined for health code violations. That reminded me that I was linked directly to the equally fun inmate search on that site a few weeks back, and, you know, I was entertained for fifteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds searching for your mom in the Pinellas County jail system (no dice, I’m sorry to say, but I’m sure she’s in jail somewhere).

The best part is that in the CL blurb, it’s clear that Hackett is pimping his site before it’s even done. Apparently, his dream of becoming rich off the Internets isn’t happening fast enough for him, so he figured he’d try to bang some traffic on his site all preview style. Now, when I was there, the site was totally bare. Between then and now, however, it looks like old Dave has been pretty busy; yes, busy making the baby jesus cry with horrible design.

Oh, the huge manatee.

Seriously dude, what the fuck are you doing over there? I think you jacked those animated menus from a site I did in 1998. No no, I insist; you keep them. That DHTML scroller at the top of everything is swell, too. I like the way it’s totally broken in your “forum.” Well, at least you learned enough HTML to find places for all those sweet ads to live. Oh, rad; one of them is inviting me to register on your most awesome website, which claims to be “the cure for corporate media.”

It appears that Dave knows a little about Corporate Media and is fully prepared to drop some knowledge about this thing the kids are calling “blogging.” You see, wait, come closer; the Man might be listening – corporate media doesn’t like it when people start to realize that on the Intarwebz, they control the means of production. Holy shit Dave, you did not just reference Marx 101 in a blog entry, did you? Hey, can I have your mini fridge when the semester’s over, bro? I’m thinking of moving out of the dorms and I need a place to keep my surplus weed. But right, Dave is fucking pissed because of the way that corporate media is starting to aggregate reader content and then use it on its websites and profit.

Wait, isn’t that exactly what’s happening on your site, Dave? I mean, all you’re really doing is culling a bunch of publicly available data in one place and then slapping a bunch of ads on it. Awww, you’re trying to be Web 2.0, aren’t you?

Look everybody, Dave’s built some sort of Web 2.0 mashup site in the seeming absence of any knowledge as exactly how to go about doing that. Remember on The Simpsons when Homer promised to build Bart a robot, but really just ended up climbing inside a box and trying to fool everyone into thinking it was a robot. Yeah, it’s kind of like that, except with Google ads. Seriously, though, nice work getting those up before the bulk of your content. I’m sure you’re rolling in mad clickthrough money as we speak.

Giving credit where credit is due, though, the weird thing is that there’s a fair amount of work going on here. This is what happens when you let dudes who work with databases for a living have websites. I mean, he does actually have to do some work to get the data in and out of his site, and I’m sure these aren’t feeds that are updated live, so I guess the poor guy is manually dumping data in periodically. Manual imports make me giggle. Bonus points for hacking through the Google Maps API, though. That actually takes a little skill, and it’s precisely that kind of stuff that makes gototell.com worth anyone’s attention.

As a Splog service, I have braved the depths of the site and gleaned the only links worth visiting. The rash I got was worth it. This is the good stuff. You click on other links at your peril.