Unz.com - web site review:

If you are unfamiliar with the name Unz, then of course you may be wondering why the weird name for the site - www.unz.com. Ron Unz is not a politician but has been involved in political causes, especially in California, for many decades. Mr. Unz was involved in the push to get bilingual education, an expensive and counter-productive program, out of the schools in California in the 1990's. (At the time of this writing, California has changed so much since even that time, that there is some talk about it again - it's baaaaaack!) I've read that Ron Unz is very well off, and I assumed that he obtained his money the hard way, not through his politics, but I don't know what his business is.

The Unz site, only a few years old, is sponsored by Mr. Unz, and he does do some writing. However, there are perhaps 20 regular other authors and a few more that are nationally known columnists, like Pat Buchanan and Paul Craig Roberts. The organization of the site is very good, and one can view the writers arranged by name with their columns or blog entries ordered by recency, or one can look for the most recent stuff. I believe that all of the columns/blogs posted have a comments section attached, which I will write more about in "useability".

USEABILITY:

The front page, unz.com, has all the new articles and authors in order, as mentioned above, to make it very easy to navigate. It seems to load fast, so must be well made, as it has to has some programming (not sure server or client side) that keep track of new comments for a given user - based on cookies, as the information is good when used with the same browser on the same computer.

The comments section of unz.com is the best I've seen on the web, ever. Firstly, it's not based on Facebook or Disqus. I particularly don't like the way Facebook orders the comments and wouldn't want any part of joining it anyway. Disqus has a better system than Facebook, but one still has to join with a valid email. Anyway, unz has it's own system that preserves decent anononymity, as much as can be truly had without discussions with some hackers, aka "computer security professionals". That is not what makes this element of the site outstanding however. There are features I've never seen before, such as a way to look quickly at responses to one's own comments without scrolling around and vice versa, a way to look at a comment that is being replied to in the one being read (you've got to view the site, most likely, to understand what I wrote here. Comments that have been view via the non-scrolling method are shown in a different color, so that one doesn't have to mentally sort through them.

Useability of this site is excellent.

CONTENT:

The writers are included in the Unz "space" on the web due to their somewhat similar views. They are definitely all what one could call conservative in the traditional sense, and not the "Conservative, Inc." crowd by any means. The writers are nationalist, anti-PC, pro-traditional-America, but the reader who is familiar with some of the pundits out there could best understand from the names. There is Steve Sailer, mentioned in this blog nearly daily, who is a phenomena, John Derbyshire (these first 2 write for VDare - see our review), Fred Reed, Ilyana Mercer and a bunch of others that I don't read as much myself, but probably should. There is a libertarian contingent, consisting of Ron Paul, Paul Craig Roberts, and Andrew Napolitano.

With all of the authors, some of whom write nearly daily, there is enough material to read to easily occupy ones spare internet time. The great comment section has already been written about, and that is good reading too, but the commenters, with some overlap, will vary in quality depending on which writer they like to follow and possibly communitcate with. The Sailer and Derbyshire commenters seem like a good crowd, but that's most of this writer's familiarity with them vs. other authors. This site is nearly as addictive to this author as ZeroHedge, and is therefore highly recommended.