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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."
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".
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.
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
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.
Are books better than book reviews?
A-Bomb