defenestrate99

Mr. Nielsen grades defenestrate99, part II

I've had some time over the weekend for my self-esteem to recover after performing so poorly against the first five of Mr. Nielsen's Top 10 Blogging No-No's. It's time to get right back on that horse and see how we did in the second half:

Mistake #6 - The Calendar is the only Navigation

Mr. Nielsen laments that "a timeline is rarely the best information architecture, yet it's the default way to navigate weblogs," and admonishes bloggers to get busy tagging. But don't over-tag. Tag just enough. "Be selective" as he says.

Way to take a kernel of a good point and offer no meaningful advice, Mr. Nielsen. You nailed it.

I know that I don't tag very well, and that I will need to improve this as my posts (ideally) grow in depth and breadth. But I wonder how accurate tagging is when it comes to information architecture on a platform like the Internet that is so subject to change. Within my own system, I suppose it will work if I am methodical and disciplined enough (which I'm not) and if my readership is willing to buy into my particular brand of tagging (which they may or may not be). I think I might be in trouble here.

Mistake #7 - Irregular Publishing Frequency

I know, I KNOW. I should publish more regularly. But here again, I think the purpose of a blog is not to be an online newspaper that is released, like clockwork, every X hours (or, in my case, Y days). Sometimes posts come fast and furious, and other times, well, we experience soapbox exhaustion and need a break. I thoroughly agree that these breaks should be few and far between, and should never exceed a week or two. My good friend and author Welch Suggs has started a very good blog about Title IX, which has been rotting on the vine since his last post (June 7, 2005), just as  another good friend has a brilliantly written blog about parenting which hasn't seen any action since Labor Day. Come on, guys. You have me reading your stuff and wanting more. Don't leave me hanging.

Then again, many of us have to work for a living and enjoy spending time with our families. Life's full of these little balancing acts, no?

Mistake #8 - Mixing Topics

Mr. Nielsen evidently doesn't like people who have interesting things to say about more than one topic. I agree that a blog that promises ruminations on technology shouldn't dedicate 80% of its posts to the author's exceptional collection of Hummel figurines, but I rather appreciate when an author moves somewhere beyond his or her normal frame of reference. It helps me understand who the author is a little better than a resume might.

And speaking of minor digressions, I saw Weezer in concert at the Santa Barbara Bowl on Friday, and it was the best concert I've seen in a long while. Go see them, if you can. They are touring with Hot Hot Heat, whom I found to be mediocre. My biggest problem with HHH was with their creepy lead singer, who looks a bit too much like an elf that got caught in a 1982 New Jersey time warp. Plus, he plays the keyboards, which just served to block him from interacting with the crowd.

Sorry for that interruption. Back to the topic at hand.

Mistake #9 - Forgetting That You Write for your Future Boss

While I know of many people who have been hired as a result of their blogs, I can think back on an equal number of times when a quick googling of a candidate's name informed me that the person was not really who they seemed to be in the interview.

This is sound advice, but I admittedly have no idea what it has to do with weblog usability.

Mistake #10 - Not Owning the Domain Name for Your Blog

Mr. Nielsen opines "weblog address ending in blogspot.com, typepad.com, etc. will soon be the equivalent of having an @aol.com email address or a Geocities website."

Once again, I think Mr. Nielsen misses a point here- it is the content of the blogs that will attract and maintain readership, not the url. Yes, owning one's blog domain gives an author more control (I actually own defenestrate99.com, but haven't gotten around to putting it out there yet) but I still read plenty of excellent and well-respected blogs who don't think that having blogspot or typepad in one's URL ranks among the top 10 issues for a blog's usability.

Conclusion

I think I pretty well pooped out when it comes to Mr. Nielsen's grading, but I'm honestly not inspired to correct any more than one or two of the "usability" issues he lists. The blogosphere might not be as analogous to Mr. Nielsen's home turf of web usability as he thinks.

Ooooh! Grade me next, Mr. Nielsen!

Jakob Nielsen, the Dr. Phil of usability on the web, has just released a compendium of 10 usability mistakes made by bloggers. Let's see how we did.....

Mistake #1 - No Author Biographies.

Mr. Nielsen contends that readers must know and trust you if you expect them to read your stuff, and that trust is hard to come by if they don't know anything about who you are or what you do. Fair enough. But how does an author writing stuff about himself inspire any more trust? I read Mr. Scoble's and Mr. Zawodny's blogs not because I have any personal knowledge of the fact that they work for Microsoft and Yahoo, but rather because the things they say are meaningful and relevant to me. I've never met either of them. I have no proof they are who they say they are on their sites. But I still read them, because in the blogosphere, content is more important than pedigree.

That being said, I have no real reason why I don't have my resume/bio up here. Part of me still thinks of this blog as not wholly situated yet (I'm waiting for my wife to design me a bitchin' logo first). I'll get there soon.

Mistake #2 - No Author Photo

This "usability" mistake baffles me. According to the post, photos enhance credibility and connect the virtual and physical world. Evidently, I am missing out on having throngs of blog groupies (bloupies?) snap photos of me at conferences because no one can put a face to my blog.

I don't have a photo here. Odds are I will probably not have a photo here. And I respond with a big, fat "who cares." I think this is totally irrelevant to the usability of blogs.

Mistake #3 - Nondescript Posting Titles

I think Mr. Nielsen got one right here. Random, overly general titles of posts don't exactly induce readers to muddle through the article to see what it was you were really talking about. For you email marketers out there, I think an analogy between an email subject line and a blog post title is accurate. If the subject sucks, forget about people opening the email.

I think I do ok here, but there's always room for improvement. And of course, you should view the post titles of Good Morning Silicon Valley as an example of the highest standard. Funny and relevant.

Mistake #4 - Links Don't Say Where They Go.

Amen. I'm reasonably guilty of this from time to time, and plan to make a concerted effort to eliminate links that say nothing more than "click here." Just as one should never put a button on a website unless it is obvious what that button will do, so it goes with blog links.

Mistake #5 - Classic Hits are Buried.

The gist of this one is that if you write pieces of lasting value to your readers, you should not make them search for it in your archives. Instead, they should be accessible through front-of-site links on your blog.

I don't get this one either.

I think Mr. Nielsen misses the point of what a blog is.  See, if people like what you have to say in a particular post, they will link to it directly. It's these links that bring the people to the doorstep of your greatest hits, not a self-selection of back links posted on your right-side navigation. Blogs reach their highest potential when you allow your readers to find their own value in your blog postings. If you have pieces you believe to be hallmarks of your blog vibe, or great examples of your work, go crazy. But I wouldn't expect any massive spikes in readership from this recommendation.

Wow. All this introspection has wiped me out. I think I'll save the remaining five mistakes for later.

Try being funny.

I don't know how long eBay keeps its expired auction listings up, so please go read the full description of this item listing while you have a chance. Go on. Read it. Do yourself a favor and read the questions and answers too. I'll wait here.

This guy is brilliant. By taking a little extra time and being just a little risky, he probably had his leather pants passed around to thousands of email readers looking for a good chuckle (metaphorically speaking, of course). Some of them may have even been inspired to bid.

I wonder why we take ourselves so seriously sometimes, and what we might achieve if we lightened up. And I'm not just talking about testing a really funny and edgy banner ad somewhere. I'm talking about a policy of being smart alecky, sarcastic, witty and eccentric, as opposed to being dignified and professional and, well, just like everybody else.

It doesn't have to be an in-your-face thing either. An example: my colleague David, the smartest developer in the known universe, was using the Aptitude Package Manager for Debian Linux yesterday and accidentally hit a command that would have removed all core files. Like any good program should, Aptitude immediately spat back a warning designed to verify that you really want to do something that might be irrevocably bad. However, instead of going the standard route of "Are you sure you want to do this," the program returned something along the lines of the following:

"Deleting these files is an exceptionally bad idea. Enter 'Yes, I realize this is a bad idea and want to do it anyway' to continue."

And by the way, you literally had to type that whole string to continue.

David, being the smartest developer in the known universe, knew very well that he didn't want to delete these files, and the cleverness of the warning message had nothing to do with his decision matrix. However, because that warning message made him laugh out loud, he is far more likely to pay attention to ALL warning messages when they pop-up in this application.

Maybe humor doesn't work everywhere. I know, some products are by their very nature serious things and arguably not conducive to irreverence (good luck with that "clever" marketing campaign for prosthetic limbs, for example). I also understand that most people aren't funny and that painful, failed attempts to be funny might indeed be worse than not attempting to be funny at all (The "is this thing on?" paradigm).

But still, going back to that guy on eBay, I couldn't help but notice that his feedback was 100% positive. And I'm sure that he will be listed as a "Favorite Seller" by gobs of people who read his listing, so that they can be the first people to read his next offerings and pass it around to their friends. Not a bad place to be if you sell stuff.

A Killer Product Had Better Kill Something

I had such a laugh reading this post at Software Only about how teens view Web 2.0- specifically how "they hate stupid 'shoot the monkey' ads...." One wonders why this would surprise anyone? A teenager who has access to even old-school video games in which you can only rip the head and spinal cord off an opponent (Sub-Zero rules!) will not stop what they are doing on the web to shoot at a monkey, no matter how annoying the simian in question may be. Let us not even speak of hot coffee.

It dawned on me after digesting that piece just how brilliantly playing video games has served as a training grounds for filtering out idiotic advertising. Think about it: if you spend countless hours of your time plotting and practicing to kill the Big Bad from any video game out there, you necessarily will have built up a massive resistance to minor distractions that threaten to keep you from reaching your goal. Apply this to our jobs as marketers, and we have presented ourselves with this real pickle- why would a teenager waste his or her time developing a skill, learning a move, or deciphering a code that has no noticeable benefit on getting to the end game? Blinking lights, loud noises and all the blood and guts in the world won't phase a fifteen-year-old who already knows what she needs to do to get to the next level of something. Either you send her a honest message that what you have to offer can save her six steps, or she will only too gladly pass you by and wait for the next opportunity or offering that can.

We have a challenge ahead of us to prove to these teenagers as they grow into very savvy 20-somethings and beyond that our products and services will actually serve some real purpose getting them to the next level. And it won't be accomplished magically, as this well-written Fast Company article points out, through a trip and hendy brand redesign:

A brand is a result, not a tactic. One cannot go about branding an organization or a product or a service; the organization, product, or service is what creates the brand. In a brilliant twist, the experts have bottled an end and sold it as a means.

Start thinking about how your killer app helps people really KILL something in their minds, and you'll have something. Otherwise, it risks being left behind as your customers assume a competing application down the road will do it better if they succeed in filtering out the noise for the time being.

Web 2.0 - Don't Believe the Hype (yet).

Geez. I've had it up to here with this Web 2.0 stuff. I mean, not the actual stuff- I'm a big fan of cool technology (like Ajax) and cool business philosophy (social software/culture of participation)- but rather the faddishness of it all. We are turning very positive trends in the Internet into the technological equivalents of parachute pants and Ricky Martin.

Tim O'Reilly, one of the biggest evangelists of the 2.0 movement, posted this as his compact (!) definition of Web 2.0:

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an "architecture of participation," and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.

Seriously?  I know that Mr. O'Reilly has more grassroots Web street cred in his little finger than most of us could ever hope to get in our lifetimes, but really. If you throw the words "scalable and robust" into that monster, you'll have yourself a vortex of double-speak the likes of which would make even the most 1.0 of web marketing professionals blush. We may be trying too hard here.

Even Venture Capitalists, a group of people much maligned for following trends like a pack of 14 year-old girls, are getting sick of it. Mr. Segal, one of the aforementioned VC's, very accurately calls the Web 2.0 hype as he smells it:

Content Management is Web 1.0 while Wikis are Web 2.0. Gimmie a break. Wikis ARE content management dressed up a web service on top of a database engine that tracks content and, wait for it, changes to that content, in other words: Content management.

We might be just a little too close to this both temporally and emotionally right now to claim adequate perspective on how we define this putative revolution. And I wonder if, when all the dust settles, and we've separated the theory from the real applications, we'll come to learn that we've just barely hit Web 1.1.