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Are In-Depth Articles Better Than Blog Postings?
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."
"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"
Thank God someone invented search engines.
both.
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.
Just because something is old does not make it irrelevant.
And certainly, the case can be made that recent writings
are irrelevant from the moment they are written. See Fox.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Honestly, this is like asking what is more useful - the Breaking News headline that you get from CNN, versus their CNN Presents or a similar feature length report. They each have their use, but obviously the more useful source is the one that is researched, well written and has some production value. What is going to appear next, Which is more useful to you - A Stub in Wikipedia or something that has some content on it?!? And what the hell is this doing on Slashdot!
I think the best comparison would be informative versus insightful posts as a generality to the best of the article and blog world respectfully. While this of course isn't completely true in the Slashdot world, the informative posts are generally from someone who has done the research and knows some good links to read through while the insightful posts hint at a general truth that was said in fewer words but still gets a powerful point across. I know I don't have time to read through all of the informative posts as some can go on forever, however they tend to make very good and solid points. The insightful posts on the other hand make a powerful point to people who already know the standpoint you are taking but hold very little water to those who disagree. /. community though I could make a very quick quip about some detail and make a powerful point. Both have their place and are generally mutually exclusive.
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
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Because, as we are all painfully aware of, if the online in-depth article is split into 60 pages, each page containing a riot of banners surrounding a lonely paragraph in the middle... well we just skip to "conclusions".
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
..."
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. 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
Most of the postings in your "elaborate, in-depth" blog are shorter than the ones in your "mundane" blog. The primary difference seems to be that the ones in the "in-depth" blog use bigger words, don't seem to have as much relevance, and don't make as much sense. Also, the black text on a turquoise background really isn't working for me.
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.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Just to make a counterpoint, in-depth does not mean "long." A concise, well researched, and well referenced blog posting is better than a typical full length fluff piece by many a so-called science journalist.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
That's an important point. Blogs are nice for getting the news out and keeping up-to-date without having to sift through all documentation over and over again, but "official" blogs in particular also need to be condensed into a more structured form of documentation for when you can't or don't want to keep up-to-date and still need to find some information about a product/event/whatever. Search engines don't magically turn blog archives into usable documentation.
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.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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 newspaper harder, but it has nothing to do with "amateurs" and everything to do with a changing market. Expecting one particular revenue source to last forever, or complaining that you've lost a revenue source because technology has moved on it selfish and short sighted. Should we instead prefer a more expensive and less efficient advertising route just to support journalism? At that point it's charity work, and I'd rather have them be honest about.
As you note, the decline of newspapers has taken decades. The internet is shaking things up, but newspapers have already suffered hits from radio and television. To drive up profits newspapers were consolidating and cutting down on the number of reporters long before the web existed. In an effort to increase readership, all too many newspapers are pandering to masses, dumbing themselves down. With newspapers generally sucking more, is it any surprise that people look elsewhere for content. And it doesn't mean that nothing will replace the newspaper. There are several self-sufficient online news sources that do original reporting (Salon.com and Slate.com immediately leap to mind).
Finally, how is this related to Nielson's article? Indeed, his entire point is: specialize, be knowledgeable, earn a reputation as being an expert in your area, and write solid in depth articles. He believes this will directly or indirectly turn into money for the author (in the form of selling related products or services, or advertising, or whatever. His core assumption is that you have a web site that you want visitors to. What you do with them is your problem.). This suggests that the situation will self correct, directly conflicting with Keen's fundamental premise.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
I enjoy ACM Portal and AI journal articles - I am not knocking peer reviewed articles.
:-) standards will evolve from things that are simple and that work.
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
Are books better than book reviews?
A-Bomb
Or 500,000 people all linking to the same original article and offering that as "content".
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
add a meta tag to original content.
/. and engadget and the register. and linuxtoday.
all rss/atom readers should incorporate meta tags for original content vs blogged content.
I really find blogs completely pointless.
I find it a terrible waste of time to get stuck reading a 6th degree blog about an article whose source eludes me.
I don't subscribe to any blogs at all. except
They're using their grammar skills there.