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Usability Newsletter!
About
the Blogosphere
An interview with
John Hiler, editor of Microcontent News.
Conducted via email by John S. Rhodes
(22-June-2002)
Weblog Usability
What do you think about weblog usability? For example, does it matter if a blog is hard to use or hard to read or that the navigation is poorly designed? Can really good content get around poor usability?
For most weblogs, content is king. I found this quote by Derek Powazek revealing:
"In my time as Creative Director of Pyra (the makers of Blogger), I got to watch which blog templates got adopted, and which ones didn't. It was fascinating, and often counter-intuitive. In general, the most widely-adapted templates were the ones that started off simple, templates that let the blogger fill in the personality.
Scott McCloud's thinking on the "universality of images" comes into play. As he put it in his book Understanding Comics, "the more cartoony a face is... the more people it could be said to describe":
Perhaps in a similar way, the more abstract a blog template is, the more bloggers it could be said to describe.
How good (or bad) are weblogging tools in your opinion? For example, as a whole, what do you think of the usability of Blogger, Radio Userland, Movable Type, and Greymatter?
Overall, I find the usability of most blogging software (aka blogware) to be extremely high - especially when compared to traditional content management software.
One concern: blogware is becoming more and more powerful, with each generation of software packed with more and more features. That's a bit worrisome to me. One of the Usability Laws I've noticed on the web is that with Great Power comes not-so-great Usability.
In any case, I think the real usability hurdle comes not from using blogware, but from setting it up.
- If you're using client software, you have to download and install it.
- If you're using server-side software, you have to download it, upload it to your server, and install it.
And you usually also have to deal with arranging a URL, setting up hosting, and configuring the templates.
For these usability reasons, I think we're seeing web-based blogware driving mass-market penetration of blogs. Of course, I'm entirely biased here - I just released my own web-based blogware powered by my WebCrimson software, hosting blogs at Crimsonblog.com and zines at Crimsonzine.com. That's the software I use to update my online blog/zine, Microcontent News.
Blogging Basics
What are your opinions and thoughts on the psychology of webloggers? For example, what motivates people to link to another web page? What is the benefit? How do people feel about their weblogs?
I'll answer your last question first: people are very attached to their blogs!
People blog for many reasons. Some do it for the attention... others do it as an intellectual outlet. Some pour their creativity into the blog design... others into their prose. In some rare cases, the pure act of blogging is an act of catharsis. But for most people, the psychology of blogging is based on the feedback.
I interviewed Glenn Reynolds for a recent article and he mentioned that he gets far more feedback on his blog than he ever got from writing columns and articles. That level of feedback keeps you going even when your motivation level is low.
What are the most common blogging mistakes? What should webloggers do to prevent making these mistakes? Are there any "best practices" for weblogging?
I'm sure there are best practices for bloggers... I don't really claim to know them. My only thought here is, find a style that works for you.
For example, a big driver of traffic is how frequently you update your site. A lot of the high-traffic sites consist of links + comment, a format that works well for many updates a day. Sometimes I try to link to more stuff, and it just doesn't work for me. I like to write out longer blog posts and long-form essays. Links just aren't my style, and I'm ok with that.
So I guess that's my best practice - do what comes naturally, and don't sweat it if you lose traffic.
What is the best way to "sell" a blog? For example, how can a new weblog get recognized and how can old weblogs keep pulling people in? Is it just about having good content?
I think the key is to blog about your passions. If you're really passionate about something, it shows.
I think every blogger goes through a phase where they lose focus on their passions and start worrying about "pulling people in" - sort of a mid-life crisis in the life of your blog. That's generally a good time to take some time off.
Why is blog diversity good? Furthermore, do you think Voyeur Web tools (e.g., Blogdex and Daypop) decrease weblog diversity? Linking diversity?
I read a post by Cameron Marlow (founder of Blogdex) about how link diversity has gone down since Blogdex came out. I think that's a good thing, since it means that information is spreading faster as the blogosphere gets more efficient.
There's been a huge spike in blog diversity in just the past year, as more bloggers have entered the fray. It used to be that most bloggers were kept by web designers, programmers, and usability experts. I love those blogs, but it's been an interesting change to see more blogs by non-techies.
Why are links so important in weblogs? Do they do more than just connect web sites together?
Links are the glue of the blogosphere.
First, links make up a weblog's blogroll: the list of links (generally on the side of a blogger's page) that show which blogs they read regularly. These blogrolls are the key to tying together individual blogs into a community.
Links also provide a convenient way for bloggers to link to content outside of the blogging universe: cool sites, interesting articles, and the like. And on the flip side, those same links provide a convenient way for blog indices like Blogdex and Daypop to keep score of what's hot or not.
Blogosphere
It seems to me that weblogs tend to point to the coolest news, or the most emotional news, versus the best news with fact checking and good sources. Do you think that is true?
Even if it's true, blogs do a pretty good job of fact checking the news. That's a useful antidote to a problem universal to all news: the need to compete for mindshare from an audience with a short attention span.
But I think you're referring mostly to personal blogs? Sites like Romenesko's MediaNews or Corante on Blogging provide useful links to relevant articles in their respective industries (media and blogging). I like that media companies like Corante are starting to use the weblog format in such innovative ways, creating a hybrid model that's half-blog, half-media.
I eat that sort of stuff up: it's largely for that reason that I publish Microcontent News under the Corante umbrella.
Do you think that weblogs are just a big popularity contest? Doesn't it seem that people just follow the pack?
Personally, I prefer to think of the Blogosphere as a democracy. I guess popularity and democracy aren't so different. Popularity is based on populus, which is Latin for people. Democracy is based on demos, which is Greek for people.
Either way, it's the same idea: every day people vote with their links for their favorite sites. It's the same principle that Google is based on. Democracy isn't perfect, but it's the best system we've got.
What do you think about weblogs that don't focus on news? I've seen weblogs with just photos, weblogs about playing games, and weblogs about sexual escapades. How do these weblogs contribute to the blogosphere and journalism and so forth?
I don't think any single blogger has any real responsibility to contribute to the blogosphere.
I'm a little reluctant to dismiss a weblog with "just photos". Noah Grey takes some unbelievable photos that make me feel embarrassed about my own blog. Zannah (usr/bin/girl) writes great blogs about video games every day. And Heather Hamilton (aka dooce.com) writes (or wrote) hilarious stuff about sexual escapades.
Anyway, someone's gotta come up with interesting stuff to link to, right?
Weblogs have increased the speed of reporting news. Has the quality of news increased, decreased, or remained about the same? Why?
My personal take is that weblogs have two roles here:
- They help break stories with their own grassroots reporting
- They help fact check and filter stories that have come out
Any individual blog post may have factual errors. But the Blogosphere as a whole is actually quite robust. I trust the Blogosphere to keep Journalists honest... and to give me a range of opinions on any given article. So in terms of my experience, I'd say that the quality of my news experience has increased.
I think the quality of news in general though, has stayed about the same. No futher comment there.
Are there good times and bad times to post a story so that it enters the blogosphere rapidly? Are there good days and bad days too?
It depends on what your goal is, I guess.
If you want to hit #1 on Blogdex or Daypop, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are good days to post something. Weekends tend to be very low traffic. If you publish on a Saturday night, your post gets linked to on Sunday and you'll be #1 on Monday, which can be a high traffic day.
That's probably not the healthiest reason to be blogging. And as of right now, Blogdex doesn't really drive a lot of traffic. Just post whenever you want. I like to finish my articles over the weekends and publish on a Sunday. It's probably not the best day to publish (lots of stuff comes out on Sunday night), but if you worry about your ratings too much you'll get sucked into the crazy world of web traffic counters and server logs.
What is dangerous about the blogosphere? What should people worry about?
Blogging can be like pouring gasoline on the fire of someone's ego.
That's bad enough, but then take a couple people like that and let them cross-blog across the Blogosphere... it can get ugly.
The blogosphere is a dimension of the media. What do you think about the people behind the scenes? What types of people are driven to run weblogs? What is the payoff and what does that mean for the health of the blogosphere?
Who are the people behind the scenes... the bloggers? the blog tool creators?
As someone who falls into both categories, I guess I have a soft spot for people who are passionate. Providing tools that let people express that passion... well as an atheist, that's as close to God's work as I can come.
The Future of Blogging
Can you imagine a time when weblogs have too much influence or too much power? Will this be any different than having five or six companies controlling the media, like we have today?
Weblogs having too much influence or too much power? Hmm... that's a tough one - you're talking to a guy who drinks blogging Kool-aid for breakfast.
I think blogs provide a healthy balance to the recent consolidation in the media industry. All that consolidation has caused an enormous drop in the diversity of voices in the media. But with the rise of personal publishing, I don't think it's fair to say that "five or six companies [control] the media" anymore... at least, if you broaden the definition of media to include blogs.
What do you think of corporate weblogs, such as those by big name journalists and Macromedia? Are they media whores? Are they shrewd? Do we have anything to learn from them? Is this the future of weblogs?
Macromedia's a good example: it's easy to dismiss their blogs as a publicity stunt, but I've read their blogs and it seems to me like they just really like what they do (Dreamweaver, Flash, etc.). I try not to think about their blogs as "Macromedia" blogs. It's just John, Mike, Bob, and Vernon, blogging about their products. Marketers are people too!
I think the same logic holds for "big name journalists". Quite a few of these journalists just pour themselves into their blogs. I have nothing but respect for someone who can spend 10 hours a day blogging. My god, where do they find the time?
What is the next step in weblogs? What can we expect next? What are your predictions for the future of weblogs and weblogging tools?
Up until recently, blogware has focused almost entirely on bloggers: the people who write weblogs. You can really see that focus starting to change.
My Prediction: this is the Year of the Blogosphere... and of the Blog Reader.
The Year of the Blogosphere: New community tools will continue to emerge: more powerful (and personalized) blog indices, distributed conversation trackers, referral trackers, rss tools, weblog neighborhood tracking, meme tracking, social network exploration tools...
The Year of the Blog Reader: improved reading tools will get better and better: more blog directories, bloggish search engines, blogroll management, commenting systems, email subscription engines...
A lot of these tools will be glued together by the emergent Internet Operating System described by Tim O'Reilly: Web Services like XML-RPC and SOAP, web-spidering API's (aka SCRAPIs), emergent search and Webs of Trust, and Instant Messaging.
It's going to be an exciting year!
John Hiler is the editor of Microcontent News, an online magazine covering weblogs, webzines, and personal publishing. He's also CEO of WebCrimson, a blogware company that produces software to host and power weblogs and webzines for personal and professional sites. John also runs Xanga.com, a blogging community site.
Editor's
Comments
Thanks John.
You've given us all a lot to think about. I'll be spending more time reading
Microcontent News.
-- John S.
Rhodes
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