Information Maven: Greg Meyer

Jakob Nielsen’s article Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes misses the point of blogs. His summary, that

Weblogs are often too internally focused and ignore key usability issues, making it hard for new readers to understand the site and trust the author….

misses the point of why I write.

Nielsen expects me to include a detailed biography, a photo, and specific titles for all of my posts so that new readers might be able to grok what I’m posting immediately. But perhaps he doesn’t realize that I write … for fun. My best search tool, as well as those who might (or might not) be reading this page would be Google. I’m not sure what folks might be searching for to find this page or why they might find it in the future.

But I do know that I’ve found many interesting, poignant, and moving writings while searching accidentally. I trust the Blogosphere to be my content filter and to help me find the bits that I’d like to read based on what I might find everywhere. This site, as many blogs are, is an ongoing experiment to catalog the things that I find interesting and not to prefigure what I might find informational in the future.

So, Mr. Nielsen, I’ll end by suggesting that the best way to find out what I’m writing in the future might be … to come back. Thanks for the useful information.