Entries Tagged 'internet' ↓

In the quest for the definitive blog ranking system, some optimistic guys (and maybe gals, who knows) have launched today the cleverly-named site blogged.

This is how it works: you submit your blog, with a description and some keywords (which they call tags, which is, you know, more 2.0 and stuff), and their team of editors will eventually review and rate your submission.

This innovative approach to organizing and ranking web-content has only two minor problems:

1. Editors need to be extremely well-versed in the categories they are responsible for. Their opinions and tastes should be in line with those of users.
2. You need an army of editors. A big one.

So maybe they can hire lots and lots of editors. Maybe they already have, who knows. But is their editor hiring process good enough? Judging from my initial explorations, the answer is “No!”.

See for yourselves: blogged Programming Blog Directory. Horrifying, isn’t it?

According to blogged, About.com: Web Design / HTML (grade: 9.3) is a better programming blog than Joel on Software (grade: 9.1), and the best programming blog of all is Slashdot (grade: 9.9), Coding Horror coming in a distant second (grade: 9.5).

Anybody that has spent any time at all reading programming blogs (e.g. me) can tell you that neither Slashdot nor About.com: Web Design / HTML are blogs, and neither of them is really about programming.

I guess the blogged guys have never heard about Yahoo! and why/how it lost in search. And I guess they haven’t noticed Technorati’s struggles, either. Sigh. If they would have just read the right blogs…

Seems today is Pacman day.

First I find, via Rinzewind, a text-adventure version of the classic game.

Some hours later I run into a beautiful Steampunk reinterpretation (via Boing Boing).

Such anachronism. And yet such beauty. :: sigh ::

Rashmi writes about the Calacanis-Winer “breakup” and asks Has anyone else noticed this trend - men being more open on their blogs?.

I don’t think men are being more open. I think these people have a clear case of diva-ism.

The blogosphere has given the so-called A-list bloggers an opportunity to behave as capricious prima donnas, and they are using it to the full. This is nothing new for men. Men have behaved like this in other spheres, such as the arts, for a long time.

But maybe it is not only the blogosphere what fosters this behavior. Perhaps it is also Silicon Valley, with its culture of technological gurus and “alpha-geeks”.

Lately I’ve been noticing that a big percentage of entry titles in the RSS feeds I read contain a numeral. Often these titles are of the form: “N ways of doing X” or “M best Ys.

This trend seems particularly pronounced in the del.icio.us/popular feed. As I write this, the top two popular bookmarks are Top 17 Search Innovations Outside Of Google and Top 57 Wikis By Rank.

Today I noticed Show Numbers as Numerals When Writing for Online Readers, one of Jakob Nielsen’s last columns. The summary of the article goes:

It’s better to use “23″ than “twenty-three” to catch users’ eyes when they scan Web pages for facts, according to eyetracking data.

Apparently writing numbers as numerals, instead of spelling them out, improves scannability of the text. Which is, of course, the exact opposite of what our language teachers taught us.

And not only numerals make your facts easier to extract from the text, Nielsen claims that numerals can also increase your credibility:

Even when users aren’t scanning for data, having your facts stand out visually by presenting them as numerals is an easy way to enhance credibility by making your page seem more useful.

This might explain the numbers-in-titles phenomenon: the “10″ in the 10 R’s to Apply if you Want to Succeed makes the title/article so credible that 668 people found fit to bookmark it. Scary stuff.

David, aka Mikus, has written a note on the predominance of Windows and IE among the platforms and browsers used by the readers of his blog (according to his server stats). Apparently only 32% of David’s readers use Firefox/Mozilla, and just 3% of them use Linux.

Here are the statistics for the traffic on anaulin.org:

So 44.17% of my readers use a browser that identifies itself as Firefox/Mozilla/Netscape (41.12%, 2.54% and 0.51%, respectively). And 10.15% use Linux. Surprising; I expected that my Mom’s use of Windows+IE would seriously skew the statistics.

I don’t know if my readership sample is more representative than David’s but, clearly, our blogs are visited by very different types of computer users. We could probably draw some interesting conclusions about the content in a blog just by looking at the platform and browser statistic for that site. For example, I would expect The Daily WTF to have an even heavier skew towards the Linux+Firefox crowd than my blog.

I wonder what are the stats for Slashdot. I bet these days it is mostly Windows+IE users visiting them…