Are In-Depth Articles Better Than Blog Postings? 157
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."
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'.
I've been complaining about this for a while (Score:5, Interesting)
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!"
Yes! In-depth is better (Score:1, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Sound-bite Society (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
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.
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.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The difference (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sound-bite Society (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 writing little more than sound-bite cover articles that link to someone else's material. I don't think this will last, for two reasons.
The first is that I don't think purely ad-supported sites have a great future. You can't force people to see your ads on the web, and a significant number of people will actively avoid it by installing ad-blocking software. Right now, the number of people doing that isn't a huge proportion, but imagine if IE9 came with ad blocking enabled by default.
The other thing is that I think the web will involve a scheme for simple micropayments before too long, providing an alternative means of funding but only to those sites good enough to get people to read their material. Things like PayPal have started us down that road. In due course, I expect browsers to support a routine "Do you wish to pay 0.1 cents to view the linked page?" sort of concept. If and when that happens, I would expect people who write worthwhile content to start structuring their sites with introductions on the public site, and charging micropayments to read the rest. No-one is going to pay micropayments very often to sites that mostly just link to someone else's work, so there will cease to be much market for such sites. Meanwhile, those who produce genuinely interesting or entertaining material will carry on, funded by the large numbers of small payments they receive from their large readership.
None of this means that the good writers will only write long articles, of course. It's just that the short ones will still have to be worth reading and not vapour built on someone else's material, or they won't earn any money.
Re:Are in depth articles better than blog postings (Score:2, Interesting)