

Write Articles, Not Blog Postings (2007) - rahul_rstudio
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/articles-not-blogs.html

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mooism2
Before everyone has a knee-jerk reaction to the title, read this paragraph
from about 15% down:

\----

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

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tangue
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.

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

~~~
tangue
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.

------
egypturnash
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.

~~~
avolcano
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" ;)

