If one looks at useit.com homepage, what is "Alertbox" to the left supposed to mean? Are they blog posts or articles? If articles, how do they differ from "Reports" below? And in the News section to the right, both the news items and "as seen in the media" are mixed together.
Calling it Alertbox is certainly more about branding than anything else. (People don’t read on the web; the subtitle is not going to help much, right?) Nielsen has been writing his column since 1995, renaming it “Jakob’s blog” or “Jakob’s column” or something like that at this point in time would be extremely stupid.
Everyone who was somewhat interested in usability during the last decade knows about the Alertbox (if only because they were annoyed by it). It’s a brand. All the noobs (who this website isn’t really targeting anyway) get the subtitle.