Doh!Let’s get something out of the way right now. Mike Alstott is one of the nicest dudes to play professional football, like, evar. His charitable actions within the local community are well documented, and he’s a god among fullbacks. Unfortunately, he appears to have totally crap judgment when picking business partners and/or ventures. In this case, we’re talking about justlookitup.com and some dude named Mike Harter.

Now, I didn’t want to write about this crap. No, I was perfectly happy to kick it and catch up on the latest scintillating tidbits from the Bradenton news desk, but I found myself compelled to act. That’s because Bay News 9 tried to give me freaking eye cancer by airing ads for justlookitup.com. I am not going to sit idly by while someone is trying to give me eye cancer, that’s for sure.

Perhaps you are familiar with the premise of these singular exercises in grave suckitude. They involve a single angle, which I’m pretty sure is being shot on someone’s nephew’s phone. Pre-production probably went a little something like this:

‘Hey, you, administrative assistant, you wanna be in our commercial?’

‘Do I have a choice?’

‘Not really.’

‘Ok.’

High production value, surely. But wait. I see wut yer doin’ there. Making it look all “viral” and shit. Good call. This is gonna be the next “Dick in a Box;” I can feel it.

The action (please, watch one for yourself) is of someone trying, and tragically failing to find a local business on the Internets. Wait for it. Cue the destruction of the totally believable gargantuan Pentium II prop computer. Ah yes, haven’t we all been this frustrated by the extraordinarily frustrating process of trying to find a local business on the Internet. Gosh, I mean, they’re really saying what we’re all thinking here. If only there were some megalithically successful search engine whose name has become synonymous with searching on the Internet to help us. That would be tits, right?

I guess we’re assed out, though. Wait, tell me more, horrible, wit-eroding commercial. Justlookitup.com you say? Brilliant. Let’s check it out. Whoa, dear god, my eyes. Wow, that is some ugly shit. You’d think that someone pimping this thing so hard would have spent a little more on design and development. Hmm, let’s do a search. Wow, look. Ads. And uh, a listing of links with zero meta information and a tacked on Google maps hack in the right bottom corner. Whew, good thing I scrolled down to the bottom, huh? I’d really like to know how far one of these places is from my house. Let’s click on the map? Hmm, does nothing.

There’s really no reason to dwell on the high level of fail present on the site itself. I think the real tragedy is that people are being separated from their hard-earned money to participate in this thing. I imagine that Alstott himself was one of these people. I mean, hey, the rhetoric in the press releases sounds nice. Apparently, this is all about supporting local business. You see, says Harter, when you shop online your dollars are not being spent in your local community. Oh sweet, so I guess your site is doing due diligence and vetting the people who want to be listed in your directory to ensure that they are owned and operated locally? Wait, no? This was a point brought up rather astutely in an early Times article about the whole enterprise.

Oh snap. Where’d ma bizness model go?

Yeah, so what is justlookitup.com exactly? It’s an online directory that lists local businesses, and attempts to sell itself by reinventing a need that’s been met for years by Google, Citysearch, Yahoo! Local, and a veritable assload of other sites.

There’s so much more wrong with this picture. I can only scratch the surface, really. I guess I don’t know what more I’d expect from a dude who apparently had as his original business model the publication of – wait for it – a paper directory that listed the websites of local companies (no, seriously, watch the ad). Wait, hang on, what’s that sound? I think I hear Tim Berners-Lee actually crying. Do I need to point out the irony here? It’s a book of the Internet. Oh, the huge manatee.