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Are In-Depth Articles Better Than Blog Postings?
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Jul 09, 2007 04:59 PM
from the think-before-you-speak dept.
from the think-before-you-speak dept.
athloi writes to tell us usability expert Jakob Nielsen is stressing the importance of well-thought-out articles as opposed to off-the-cuff blog postings. "Blog postings will always be commodity content: there's a limit to the value you can provide with a short comment on somebody else's comments. Such postings are good for generating controversy and short-term traffic, and they're definitely easy to write. But they don't build sustainable value. Think of how disappointing it feels when you're searching for something and get directed to short postings in the middle of a debate that occurred years before, and is thus irrelevant."
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Balanced ecosystem (Score:5, Interesting)
Obviously if everybody posts short blurbs, it just doesn't work, for obvious reasons. On the other hand, if *everybody* posts long, well-thought-out articles, it'd be hard to find 1. What you're interested in, since often the shortposters serve the function of aggregating cool things, and 2. Where the 'blogosphere' action is. There'd be fewer conversations, and indeed, short posts are part of a conversation.
Luckily, there appears little danger of everybody posting well-thought-out articles.
Personally, I'm starting to reap the benefits of longer articles on my science/tech blog [blogspot.com]. Lots of repeat readers. But it's so hard to get exposure when you have fewer chances for 'hits'.
Re:Balanced ecosystem (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, yeah, but that just means you have a lot of well-thought-out articles. It's hard to find a downside to that. More research is always better.
Blogs, on the other hand, are streams of consciousness. I don't see an "ecosystem" at work so much as just a bunch of people offering their opinions. It's like calling Bill O'Reilly a "verbal blogger".
My point is, there is a lot of value is well-thought-out articles. There is significantly less in offering opinion about the news.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Balanced ecosystem (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Balanced ecosystem (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Balanced ecosystem (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:2)
The articles for the in depth blog are made up of multiple sections. The left hand side navigation takes you to the different sections of each article. The secondary horizontal navigation takes you to the different articles. Although each page from the in depth [transitionchoices.com] blog is smaller than a blog entry from the mundane [blogspot.com] blog, if you added up all the section pages for any article, you would find that the articles from the transition choices site are larger than the entries from the blogspot site.
Thanks for the fe
Are in depth articles better than blog postings? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Are in depth articles better than blog postings (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Are in depth articles better than blog postings (Score:5, Funny)
My in depth analysis would be: possibily but not necessarily.
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Re:Are in depth articles better than blog postings (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Are in depth articles better than blog postings (Score:5, Funny)
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GAH (Score:4, Funny)
I CANT TAKE IT!! ITS TOO META!!
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Re:Are in depth articles better than blog postings (Score:5, Insightful)
Are books better than book reviews?
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I've been complaining about this for a while (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I've been complaining about this for a while (Score:5, Insightful)
I've always thought of reading material in two simple categories: one-off and long-term. One-offs are things like tutorials or thought-provoking opinion pieces. Long-term tends to be reference material, but might also be something entertaining or profound enough to be worth revisiting once in a while.
Both can be valuable in their own way. Both can also be a waste of time and space. You need a different approach to write each well. And the scary thing is that most people — even those who write as part of their job — really suck at working out what kind of material is actually useful, and writing accordingly.
By its nature, ideal reference material is easy to find. That typically means that there are only a few places to look, and it's easy to search for what you need in those places. Once you get there, the material needs to be comprehensive and authoritative. No-one likes looking around for the same bit of information all day, and winding up with three half-baked, semi-contradictory versions of it in the end.
Blogs are the very antithesis of this ideal. There are a zillion of them. In any given field, there are typically a few really good ones, but the average quality is usually quite poor. The most organised search facilities you'll find are tagging (fine for locating related content within the same blog, but generally not much use for searching across blogs) and web search engines (which I use less and less as certain types of page get ever better at gaming the system and getting their stuff up-top when I don't really want to see it). This makes the recent push by many companies, Microsoft prominently among them, to disseminate technical reference information via blogs a pretty bad idea.
What blogs are really good at is conveying interesting nuggets of information. A blog post can be long enough to introduce a useful idea, or to draw attention to something newsworthy. Blogs lend themselves to being scanned by those looking for something interesting but unsure of what.
Bottom line: if these businesses really want to help people find the useful information, they should go back to maintaining a small number (ideally one!) of comprehensive, authoritative reference sites, and use blogs and newsfeeds as introductory material: highlight a useful new development or draw attention to a handy technique, direct the reader to the appropriate reference material if they want to know the details, and make sure the user never has to come back to that particular blog post again.
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Depth and Reputation (Score:5, Interesting)
Similarly, Nielsen's article suggests that by tossing off random blog articles, even if you also post highly insightful material, you lower the average value of what you post. You effectively cede some of your reputation.
That's even more of an issue with topic-based blogs. If your focus is, say, US politics, or astronomy, etc. you have to stick close to your topic, or people will start complaining, "Why are you spending all this time talking about your cats!"
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Depth and Reputation (Score:5, Funny)
AND went on to become SeCATary of State, then fucked it up so badly they hung his tail from a plaque as a warning to others. It was a real cat-ass-trophy.
I... I can't believe I actually signed my name to that.
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The difference (Score:3, Informative)
In depth articles contain more research than a few links to wikipedia or other similar minded blogs.
That's the difference.
Blog posts. (Score:3, Insightful)
Blog posts are pretty much editorials or opinions.
In depth articles contain more research than a few links to wikipedia or other similar minded blogs.
That's the difference.
I don't think their briefness makes blog posts less valuable since while they are limited in scope they tend to be very focused on one or two issues. I have found the answers/fixes to some really vexing programming questions/problems/bugs in blog posts that would never have been addressed in an in-depth article. Both blogs and in-depth articles have their uses and comparing the two is IMHO rather futile.
Sound-bite Society (Score:4, Interesting)
I always try to give my blogs a little substance. I don't have much of an audience, but I like to have discussions rather than link every news story on a given topic or talk about what pretty much everyone else is already talking about.
But I don't run a commercial blog. My entire site is about updating family and friends, sharing some of my work, and hosting my resume.
For commercial blogs, if you don't update daily (or more!), how will you get those oh-so-precious ad impressions? Not only that, but lengthy articles are boring! Worse, lengthy, well-researched blog posts take a lot of time and energy to produce even once a week, let alone every half-hour! Sound-bites, that's what we want to read, and that's what we want to write, and that's how you get ad impressions...
I agree with the general sentiment that blogging is largely empty. I would like to see the internet restore a level of discourse once dominated by newspapers and largely destroyed by television. But there's probably a saying somewhere about genies getting back into bottles that applies (also acceptable: worms and cans). Go read Neil Postmans "Amusing Ourselves to Death" and try again...
Re:Sound-bite Society (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess I should have included sarcasm tags or something because I really like longer articles (as I hoped to make clear by pointing out that I write long articles).
But people's interest in longer articles is somewhat limited and, perhaps more importantly, if you're just looking for ad impressions then lots of short articles means more visitors. My site gets updated between once a week and once a month, depending on how busy school is, but I try to write articles that have more substance than "Here is a
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This is sad, but true, I agree. Right now, the best way to get funding for relatively minor sites is by hosting advertising, and generating the page hits by
Short Answer (Score:4, Insightful)
If you are trying to glean some new information from the info you have then brainstorming, trains of thought, gut reactions, etc (the kinds of info you find on blogs) work great. If you are trying to learn something that is well established, then nothing beats well thought out in-depth research.
Relevancy (Score:5, Insightful)
And certainly, the case can be made that recent writings
are irrelevant from the moment they are written. See Fox.
Blog posts! (Score:4, Funny)
CNN (Score:5, Insightful)
They are valuable for different reasons (Score:4, Insightful)
To demonstrate, think about debating evolution to a creationist. The only way you would ever even have a chance is with very carefully constructed and researched arguments such as the article example. If I were to make a comment about evolution to the majority of the
Advantages (Score:4, Funny)
- Provide commentary by famous people like Wil Wheaton and... well, just Wheaton, really.
- Melt unsuspecting servers into slag
- Ruin the ending to the next Harry Potter book (bastards.)
- Display your news in borders of your favorite color or pink
- Make you laugh at cooking/AIDS jokes
- Determine whether something could, in fact, run Linux
Depends (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
How do you think I came up with it in the first place?
Info first, dig for details later (Score:2)
What about the longevity of Slashdot posts then? (Score:2)
I guess by that standard, Slashdot is just about useless.
No, but seriously. I write both blog-style pieces and article-style pieces for my website, and and traffic-wise, and there are some blog entries I wrote a while back that do great (and still bring in a bunch of visitors every day and several new links in every week despite having been written
It depends. (Score:2)
-blog (Score:2)
Ahh, much better.
Poor Jacob (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want recent materials and not articles created years ago, you hit the "News" link in Google.
Talking about outdated content, this page was linked straight from Jacob's index page [useit.com]. I'll quote:
"Why This Site Has Almost No Graphics:
Download times rule the Web, and since most users have access speeds on the order of 28.8 kbps, Web pages can be no more than 3 KB
You decide. (Score:5, Funny)
Today I woke up and had some coffee. It was gross - they used that artificial creamer that they get cheap from SysCo.
Took a shower. Nothing eventful. I'm getting back hair in new places. Yuck.
Decided that in depth articles SUCK!
OK, time for breakfast - I think I'll have a bagel.
Comments:
1) By HoosierFan2006, 6:40 a.m.:
I just wish my hair would come back! LOL!
2) By Canonball25532, 6:51 a.m.:
No, in depth articles rock. You're an idiot.
3) By CatLover, 6:53 a.m.:
Anyone know where I can get a discount air conditioner? It's *hot* this week!
Does anybody actually read the subject? (Score:2)
Online, there is no natural selection to weed out the crappy worthless blogs that don't really contain any information or generate any traffic/revenue.
Yes, and it's irritating when... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah. I remember finding some post on The Cure for Information Overload [hyperborea.org], and it took forever to get to the actual story!
Time, Interactivity and Abstraction (Score:3, Interesting)
In depth articles, on the other hand, have the luxury of time and editing but are often obsoleted by blogging. Secondly articles often lack an effective feedback mechanism such as the comments within blogs.
Wiki's can straddle the two mediums, with a body of written and reviewed content allowing for in depth content while providing up to the minute content as well.
Reviewed scholarly articles are on the far end of this spectrum. Slow to come out, but often authoritative.
As a result, my position is that blogs and RSS feeds of blogs allow for one to get a handle on large amounts of breaking news. Wikis provide background. In-depth articles provide analysis. I.E. Blogs alert me to things, i then check Wikis for background and context, and if I deem the issue important enough, or the author credible enough I'll read the article.
Not clear the argument is correct.in practice (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's say that the long piece you write has a standard deviation that's 1/3 that of the blog posting. (In other words, there's a chance you could write a single piece that damages your brand equity -- Nielsen assumes away this possibility.) If you then write 10 blog pieces, you'll have the same standard deviation for the average as a single long piece. Moreover, the maximum quality of your blog postings will on average be greater than that of your single pieces (because you're drawing from a distribution with a higher standard error). The basic point is that lots of observations may permit folks to infer your quality more accurately. It's not necessary that customers plow through all postings to figure this out --- there are content aggregators (like Slashdot
So what do people evaluate? Your best work? Your average work? The mean quality divided by the standard deviation?
I think Nielsen is correct that you need to think about the impact you're having with what you write, and he may have been correct regarding the advice he gave his world expert, but if you're writing only a few big pieces, you better get them right, or else!
Which is better, a symphony or a pop tune? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a silly question. They're all valuable.
Blog postings should not be compared to "in-depth articles." They're not the same thing. They are more comparable to transcripts of bull sessions. A good online exchange is something like sitting in on a lunchtime conversations between a prof and his grad students.
Quite likely if you could listen on a tape recording of Socrates gabbing with his students in the groves of Academe, before Plato selected and polished and smoothed and delete expletives, it would read like blog postings.
web search often yields good blog tech material (Score:3, Insightful)
That said, I find useful "how to" information on web blogs very frequently.
I write what I call "web books" (a lot of care taken, some peer review and corrections), and I also blog a lot. I just looked at my own web logs to see which are accessed more often: it looks like the web books are accessed more than individual blog entries, but the 'home page' for the 2 blogs are hit much more.
I access web blog content in a way that I can't for papers: I have about 5 blogs that I read everyday because I know the other bloggers both have similar interests and I trust their opinions. It is rare that I run across someone's web site and enjoy it so much I download all their papers, etc.
Even more off topic, but: the important thing is that blogs and papers on the web "stick around" forever, hopefully with non-changing URIs. It seems like most search engines apply some reasonable bias towards new material (from trusted sites) so old material does not "get in the way". Web blogs have inherent time stamps - for regular web pages, papers, etc. RDF meta data would suffice for maintaining the time line of digital assets on the web.
I have been using the web since 1991 (and the Internet since the early 1980s), and my take is: we have "not seen nothing yet". I believe that we will see more progress of moving towards a shared knowledge commons on the web in the next ten years than we have seen in the last 15 years of the web. I have some skepticism about the Semantic Web, but I am optimistic that grass roots semantic web (notice the lower case
false dichotomy (Score:3, Funny)
There exist crappy, shallow articles.
What are we linking to here, again?
Re:Yes! In-depth is better (Score:5, Insightful)
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"Cult of the Amateur" is hype and scare tactics (Score:3, Insightful)
As far as I can tell, Keen's more interested in sell books by stirring up controversy than actually covering the situation in an evenhanded way.
Take, for example, the claim that Craigslist is killing newspaper reporting. Craiglist is in no way shape or form a substitute for news. It has nothing to do with "amateurs." It's a freaking classified ads site. It's been the land of amateur advertising for decades. It is killing the classified ads section of the newspaper, and that may make running a newspap