Trying not to gender-type my kids, tonight we watched the following videos on the Powerbook at bedtime (when we really should have been reading The Twits): Avril Lavigne’s Sk8er Boy and Losing Grip; NASA’s amazing, speeded-up video of Discovery spinning in orbit to provide astronauts aboard the space station with a good view of its heat-shield and an exciting video of the launch from a chase plane; the remarkable Birmingham tornado camphone footage from BBC Birmingham’s site.
The tornado material is bizarre and scary and the NASA site produces genuine excitement – the long, dramatic videos are amazing (I guess they should be) but what is it, exactly, that stops Avril Lavigne‘s record label from providing something that might actually entertain my utterly smitten (5 year-old) daughter on their web site? All the videos are truncated to less than a minute and postage stamp-sized (even in best quality)… and don’t get me started on navigation.
The photo gallery is pathetic and there is nothing else to look at (unless you pay an unmentionably large sum of money for ‘membership’ of this travesty of a web site – I wonder how many members they have). When you’re a little girl and you type Avril Lavigne into Google, don’t you have a right to expect something from the official site? How stupid is it to throw away your top fans’ enthusiasm in return for… well… what exactly?