Five years of saila.com; roach-bait marketing

Five years ago today, I moved my tilde account (once found at http://www.interlog.com/~saila/), which had been online since late 1996, to its current domain, saila.com. Take a look at the past designs of the site as it evolved from a personal portfolio/resumé site to its current incarnation:

Mark Newhouse has followed up his clever Netscape-4–friendly, three-column layout with an excellent new site called Real World Style. The site offers his three-column layout and a two-column version, as well as a collection of style snippets for forms and floating images. If you work with CSS on a site where the five-year-old Netscape 4.x still matters, bookmark Newhouse’s new site.

They call it “roach bait marketing” and it’s sweeping the continent. The latest example of how marketers are undermining people’s trusting nature has actors playing regular people using things like camera phones. My favourite sleaze quote from the Globe’s story comes from a youth marketer: “Peer pressure is the best-selling tool you could possibly have.” Ironically, the media attention this one campaign got help promote the product more than the actors ever code.