Jakob "Usability" Nielsen has just published an Alertbox on blogging. It's depressing to discover that this blog fails at least five of his strictures: No Author Photo, The Calendar is the Only Navigation, Irregular Publishing Frequency, Mixing Topics, Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service. The jury is still out on Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss and Nondescript Posting Titles. I'm not sure whether Classic Hits are Buried applies, as I don't know if I have any classic hits; but if I have 'em, they're buried. Sob.
Some of these are easier to fix than others. But I guess I really Must Try Harder.
2 comments:
I think the bit about 'Irregular postings' doesn't take into account RSS feeds. If someone doesn't blog daily or weekly and you actually have to visit their site to get their updates, then you are going to lose readers. But if they have a aggregator picking up stuff from a dozen locations, its not a big deal.
On the flip-side, an aggregator probably makes the headline/first sentence more important.
'Classic Hits' is trickier. I think they left out what should be a 'classic hit'. The most hit pages ? Or is it the 'catcher' articles that will take some-one who has stumbled on your blog to the pages that are most likely to turn them into a regular reader.
Not sure about the domain name bit. It seems to confuse the domain name and hosting. Actually a bigger plus in favour of your own hosting provider is putting up non HTML/jpg files (such as source code)
Not sure about the anonymous bit being less credible than having an ID. After all, I could be anybody even with a picture.
Information Week for example has a regular column called the Secret CIO where the columnist is anonymous in order to protect the employer but I don't think there is any loss in credibility with "Herbert Lovelace".
The "Writing for your Future Boss" is only relevant if you are not anonymous.
Other than that, good list.
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