Write Articles, Not Blog Postings (2007) | Hacker News Reader

Write Articles, Not Blog Postings (2007)

useit.com

Before everyone has a knee-jerk reaction to the title, read this paragraph from about 15% down:

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Obviously, I am referring to the user experience and to the style of the content in this analysis; not to the technology used to serve up this content. Thus, what I call "articles" might be hosted on a weblog service. What matters is that the user experience is that of immersion in comprehensive treatment of a topic, as opposed to a blog-style linear sequence of short, frequent postings commenting on the hot topic of the day. It doesn't matter what software is used to host the content, the distinctions are:

* in-depth vs. superficial

* original/primary vs. derivative/secondary

* driven by the author's expertise vs. being reflectively driven by other sites or outside events

He's assuming quality is distributed normally among blog posts without much explication on how he came to this conclusion. Usability deserves a better guru.

Assuming that "quality" is the sum of a large number of independent factors, I guess the central limit theorem applies.

Maybe. But by reading his article even if it were a Pareto distribution, his arguments would have been valid. While the pieces of advice he gave are good, the pseudo-scientific explanation behind his intuitions ("The metric probably follows a normal distribution...", "I ran a Monte-Carlo simulation... " baffles me.

Man I just treat my blog like I used to treat my Livejournal: I write about whatever I want to write. Sometimes that's "woo check out this cool YouTube video". Sometimes that's "hey come see me dance". Sometimes it's a dream I had. Sometimes it's musings on comics I like, or on the ones I'm working on.

And every once in a great while I actually try to write up something about how I use the tools I've mastered. Then I get bored and go use them instead and post the cool new thing I've drawn.

I go for a hybrid approach. A personal blog (or nowadays, Twitter) for sharing random Youtube videos, commenting on politics, and other stuff, and then a "professional" blog for writing longer articles on. It's nice knowing potential employers can see writings that are actually relevant to my field, and not "check out this Gangnam Style parody" ;)

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