Overall, I'm disappointed with the new site. I don't understand why the old site had to be gutted to create a new site. When Amazon took over IMDB, they didn't change the entire look and feel of the site, and it is still the same great resource it has always been.

Here are my criticisms:

1. This site feels very cluttered compared to TVTome. Too much flash, and information-sparse graphics, taking up way too much valuable screen real estate. And maybe it's just me, but I LIKE text links over graphics links. Of course, I also grew up using CP/M and teletypes... I like flash when I want to watch animations. When I want information, I want to see text. I guess it's kind of a USA Today vs. New York Times type of distinction. Though to me TV.com feels more like US Weekly than USA Today.

2. It feels slow. TVTome was slow sometimes, but other times it was blazingly fast. While TV.com's speed seems more consistent, it is never as fast as TVTome was, when it was fast.

3. Navigation is much more difficult. Things that were on one page or could be gotten to with one click from a main show page, now take a number of clicks. One thing I used to do is see if the guest stars of a particular episode ever appeared before on the series, and when was their first appearance. This is nearly impossible to do in TV.com, since appearances are sorted in alphabetical order and there are no dates for each appearance.

4. The movie credits are GONE. MovieTome is still up, but the person links now go to tv.com, so there is no cross-referencing back to the movies that an actor appeared in. Even the IMDB link that used to be on TVTome.com is gone, so there's no easy way to find out what movies a particular TV actor has done.

5. I wish that the old forums were archived somewhere besides www.archive.org (which tends to be incomplete, and certainly won't have the lastest posts before TVTome was shut down). While there might have been a lot of junk in the old forums (though that is no different than these forums), there may have quite a few been gems. And since the old TV Tome lacked a search feature, who knows what kind of gems would have turned up if searching the old forums were made possible? I guess we may never know, just like we'll never know what was lost when the Library at Alexandria burned down.

6. All the user-submitted reviews are nearly useless. On TVTome.com, reviewers were selected based on writing samples, so you knew that a review was going to be well-written. Finding a well-written reviews on this site is difficult. For some reason even IMDB and Amazon, which also allow users to write reviews, seem to have a better quality of reviews than the ones here. I'm not sure why, or what screening process they might have over there.

7. All the hypertext links from the old episode summaries and "allusions" (the old "Cultural References") and such have disappeared. I can't figure out any reason why, since HTML and hyperlinks do seem to be allowed on this site.

8. Overall, this kind of feels like the G4 takeover of TechTV, which has been nearly universally disliked by former TechTV fans (and one only needs to look at Alexa's two-year statistics on G4TV.com vs. TechTV.com to see the evidence that people have left that site in droves). Looking here, it seems TV.com may be starting to suffer the same fate.

On the plus side, I am actually liking the new editor selection process, with the trusted user. Though one problem with it is what happens if an editor falls off the face of the earth (or at least the web)?

At least now I am finally editor of "The Howard Stern Show", for which I contributed a whole bunch of episode data over a year ago in order to convince the the old webmaster to make me editor, but he never did, presumably because it is a "talk show" (though somehow that didn't prevent me from becoming editor of "Unscrewed with Martin Sargent", which had more of a talk show format than Stern). However, trying to clean up the mess that was this episode guide is proving difficult, and I'll post why in my next blog entry.