I’ve been reading Dave Barry’s blog since its inception, bunnies and all, and I’m disappointed. His column continues to amuse me, but I had hoped the blog would do the same. Instead of writing his own humor, he simply publishes strange and humorous links that are sent to him.

Although it doesn’t detract from the humor, his use of generic words for links is mildly annoying. I realize he wants to make it a surprise by not revealing the punchline. He’ll say, “this is why we love america” with ‘this’ as a link, leaving the user with no idea as to what the link is. Google’s page rank algorithm is less useful because it associates words with what they link to and the words he uses are too common. Also, if a program were to display the links on the site, it wouldn’t be very descriptive. You would see something like:

this site
this woman
this link
this site
here
this
these

I’m not saying he should stop, because it may work for his purposes of humor, but in general, using descriptive link text is preferred.