Technology Review is irritating me.

When I was in college, I used to sneak off into the stacks to read it when I should have been finishing the reading for my english class. Back then it was a primarly black and white glossy with a bit of spot color. It’s main demographic was MIT alumni, and those who thought like them. These days it’s a completely modern magazine, complete with endless redesigns, that resembles far too many of the techbiznophillic magazines of the dot-com era. I used to go to read Tech Review for thoughtful critiques of technology by people who were, often as not, practitioners. There is still some of that there, but I cringe at the amount of boosterism written by people whose first contact with high tech was the computer they used to write on in journalism school.

None of this has anything to do with my current irritation with Technology Review, or perhaps I should say”: my ongoing irritation with Technology Review.

Two or three weeks ago, I tried signing in, only to be told that my browser wasn’t accepting cookies, even though it was, as evidenced by the fact that the technology review website had set 4-5 cookies in my browser. Not that it mattered, because I could see full text on everything.

More irritating was that the categorized navigation was broken, and still is, weeks later. If I go to biotech & healthcare, I see some relevant stuff mixed with an equal amount of irrelevance to the topic at hand, like articles about whether Linux can overthrow Microsoft.

At times like these, it would be nice if sites would post an announcement letting its users know that yes, “we know things are broken and, no, we don’t think you are too stupid to notice or care.”