Nielsen on blogs

[sigma7]

Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox). As with pretty much everything Nielsen does, I agree with him overall in principle and some of his ideas specifically, but certainly not all. This piece seems aimed specifically at those who'd blog for a living or with the intention of drawing an audience as opposed to those of us who just sorta splatter ideas on the wall like spaghetti:

Establishing and meeting user expectations is one of the fundamental principles of Web usability. For a weblog, users must be able to anticipate when and how often updates will occur.

I'm not sure anyone reading my work in this forum could adhere to this idea. We may have side projects in a blog-like format that have specific schedules, but my writing is independent of my audience's wants and needs (as I'm sure you've figured out).

If you have the urge to speak out on, say, both American foreign policy and the business strategy of Internet telephony, establish two blogs. You can always interlink them when appropriate.

Can you imagine? I'd have more blogs than Blogger if this were the case.

Certainly, you shouldn't post when you have nothing to say. Polluting cyberspace with excess information is a sin.

This is one of those nuggets of idiocy that makes me tune out Nielsen entirely and miss the valuable, insightful bits of his analysis. But I think I'll survive.

Comments

[opheliasclone.livejournal.com]

I think this sums up my problem with the whole exercise:

"Some weblogs are really just private diaries intended only for a handful of family members and close friends. Usability guidelines generally don't apply to such sites, because the readers' prior knowledge and motivation are incomparably greater than those of third-party users. When you want to reach new readers who aren't your mother, however, usability becomes important. "

While recognizing the medium's primary importance as lowering the barriers to published communication to the everyman, he basically writes the everyman off his books before pronouncing his judgments.

I feel he's missed the entire point of blogs. If you don't understand or care for the primary use of a medium, then you're liable to write anything resembling it off as "poor usability." Sure, blogs are used to promote writers and offer news analysis and so forth. But those other applications still stem from the original use for blogs and continue to resemble regular blogs.

If you're expecting a blog to act like a web page for dummies, you're just not getting the point. Web sites are updated on a regular basis. Blogs aren't.

[jkgriffin.livejournal.com]

Cyberspace is already totally hopeless. Besides, who's to say what information is excess? One person's navel-gaving is a sociologist's treasure trove. There are differing opinions on the utility of the ubiquitous porn...

He doesn't want you to say anything unnecessary, yet update at regular intervals. Seems counter-intuitive to me.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

It's like advocating against alcohol on campus. Or nitrogen in the atmosphere. Or fleas on dogs. Except that it's not merely impractical to the point of impossibility, it's antithetical to the nature of the Internet, which is to be a repository for all types of information, not merely that which ivory-towered individuals would deem worthy. It's a ludicrous assertion -- who determines when information is excessive? -- which seems positioned as a conversation-starter or a carryover to another topic, but when I got to his declaration of spam as "time pollution" my eyes rolled until they sprung out of my head and went scooting across the floor and it took all day to coax them back into my skull. I'm no fan of spam either, but he does strike me as near-hysterical on this topic.

It's disheartening for me, because JN has a reputation as an Internet guru, and I can agree with most of his initial ideas and yet almost none of his resulting conclusions. At best I think this recent deluge of content should be laden with caveats, at worst ignored altogether.

[cptn-oblivious.livejournal.com]

Felix Unger - laughing "It's not spaghetti it's linguini."
Oscar Madison - Throws the plate of pasta
Oscar madison - "Now it's garbage!"