Every experienced web developer will have discovered that too many features leads to confusion for users. This happy user peak chart helps you visualise it.
However, there are ways to squeeze extra features in while maintaining usability and some sites manage to do this well. Flickr and Ebuyer are two examples. Amazon has gone past the peak – I have found myself stuck on amazon.co.uk more than once and then find it impossible to contact them.
The Thai authorities have placed a block on the betting website www.betfair.com.
I just tried to access Bet Fair from my hotel room in Bangkok and was redirected to a standard blocked URL page written in Thai script. The operator of this page is the Thai Ministry of Information and Communication Technologies (MICT).
While I do not advocate betting, I do support peoples freedom of choice. If people want to gamble, they will find a way. Governments should support responsible gambling rather than attempting to ban it. Like most things, betting is fine in moderation.
For interest's sake, I tried some other betting websites and found that the Thai authorities have blocked some sites but not others.
Governments that attempt to sensor the web face a never-ending challenge. Freedom of speech is almost guaranteed through the very nature of the internet. Information that you cannot reach in one way you can reach in another. It's a web.
The Thai government should spend less time trawling the web for sites of which it disapproves and more time learning how to build proper websites. The MICT homepage breaks all these long established web design rules:
MICT should spend some time at Web Standards Project and W3C.
Zible is the blog where I, Jake Brumby, save things of interest...
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