the great gossip mashup

The latest opportunity that I was presented over at PayPerPost was to review a website based on the latest celebrity gossip. While I am by no means fascinated with the lifestyles of coddled movie-star millionaires, I am more than happy to shed some constructive website criticism.

First off, the page is pink. Hot pink. Nearly hot magenta, in fact. They've certainly got their audience targeted, as I know of few machismatic guys who follow this type of "entertainment". They've got a few Adsense ads at the top and right sidebar, which are fairly unobtrusive. This already makes the site ten times better than most of the gossip sites that I've run into in the past, that like to intersperse cleverly designed Adsense advertisements within the content articles.

Each article opens to a new page, which is a bit annoying. I guess that they wanted to keep their homepage in the background at all times. In fact, it appears that this site is primarily a collection of gossip feeds presented in one friendly format, or a "mashup" as it is commonly called (and increasingly overused). It also lists related stories posted by other bloggers under each article, so you can catch the latest gossip from several different angles. (It *is* his baby! No, it *is* not!)

Offering users the ability to vote on reported stories (once they have registered with the site), the site functions a bit like a less structured celebrity blogging version of Digg. There are three tabs at the top of the page - "hot", "latest", and "celebrities". Clicking on "celebrities" allows you to search for your favorite Hollywood heroes and heroines by name (alphabetically). I'm not quite sure what the "hot" page is for, since it didn't seem to be sorted by popular vote. I don't really know what makes it a "hot" story...they don't really explain it. Maybe it is based on page views...

Apparently, there is also a chance to earn "points" by referring your friends to signup for an account. These "points" can be exchanged for magazine subscriptions. Their points system reminds me a little of a pyramid scheme, as you earn points when your friends sign up, and when their friends sign up, and so on, and so on. So you basically read about celebrity gossip stories to earn points to subscribe to magazines that will give you more celebrity gossip stories. It's like the old "chicken or the egg" approach, but wrapped in Gucci.

Overall, this isn't exactly the type of website that I would visit, and I feel fortunate that my wife doesn't concern herself with these types of things much, either. However, anyone who is having trouble keeping on top of the latest celebrity gossip through a regular feed reader might benefit from the consolidation of fresh tinsel town news available from this website.