Chris Henderson

8 – 25 – 04

Written Assignment 1

Comparing the establishment and use of conventions of the two sites:

www.maddox.xmission.com and www.imdb.com

In bold letters, bright at the top of his page, Maddox establishes his domain as “The Best Page in the Universe.” He robustly follows with the drawing challenge that everything he says stands right and any of your disagreements fall wrong. Immediately, the reader wishes to refute his loud statement and begins to study his articles. And it hits them, they discover that this man, pen named ‘Maddox,’ is one of the funniest men alive. And despite being the blunt of many of his comments, we check his site every day for a new funny article.

The Internet Movie Data Base also employs a contest, staking that its large collection of movie statistics is, quite obviously, the “Earth’s Biggest.” Plainly bold on the front page we observe that over 27 million (underlined) people visit this database a month. Then comes the site’s personal welcome and confident offer to make this massive database site the user’s personal homepage.

That is one of many of the internet’s conventions that imdb.com uses. The site utilizes an internet search engine below its own to search for needed movie data. Among the smaller conventions, including links, ads, and recent news articles, the site allows users to become part of the database. By registering, the user can post messages and rank movies, among other things.

Maddox, on the other hand, interacts much less with outside resources. He runs absolutely no advertisements, strongly (and correctly) determined that his site flourishes by word of mouth. Other than archives of his past writings and links to web-pages he respects, the main web convention that he exercises is a statistic log of his page’s hits. He also guards his simple lay-out from aggressors by lifting his finger toward Google (which, as we know, has the simplest lay-out ever).

Maddox’s articles satire ridiculous events that he either observes or partakes in. They point out inadequacies and BS flowing daily from commercials, celebrities, and people in general. Maddox uses his sarcastic writing style and genius combinations of explicit words to explain these events and observations which occur in our world. And this is how we relate his site to it. The reader can also choose to buy one of his shirts.

The IMDB keeps up with the quick moving movie world. It links recent movie articles, currently playing movies, movies still in production, new movie trailers and photos, and, on the side, displays spots of information about actors and actresses. The site replaces calling the local theatre, flipping through the newspaper, asking an unreliable friend what he thought about the movie, and possibly crying.

The two slightly similar techniques successfully created large followings for both of the sites. The IMDB owns a huge reputation for its up-to-date movie database, while Maddox receives a few million visitors just from his articles and his just as humorous, condescending remarks to us, his readers.