Jakob Nielsen’s latest diatribe attempts to prove that it’s better to writer articles, not blog postings in a blog. I’ve got mixed feelings about this.
My blog is over seven years old, but I broke it into two parts a few years ago. The two parts being: Blog and Features. I put longer articles with a lasting value in the features and everything else in the blog section. I came across this idea from surfing many blogs one winter. I discovered that the longer posts drove me away more than retained me.
I thought splitting the content into two sections would make a good compromise. When I first started this, I used to write a short intro in the blog about the newest feature. So those who had the time and interest could read it otherwise they move on. But then came the redesign. Now a short summary of the latest entries in both the blog and features appears on the home page. I like it that way, but it makes it difficult to do an intro. Wouldn’t it look silly for the intro and feature of the same story to appear on the home page at the same time?
Nothing I can do about that. I do have three feeds: one for blog, one for features and one for both. But what if those reading the blog feeds don’t realize a feature feed exists? The chances of vice versa are slim because the blog came long before the feature. Hmm… maybe I need to explain this somewhere in the Web site section of the About page.
There are so many blogs out there — if bloggers want our attention, wouldn’t shorter be better since it gives us more time to explore more blogs? This isn’t to say that a blog entry should never be long — a business that wants to share its opinion or expertise may need to do that through an article. Perhaps, articles can be an occasional feature instead of a daily thing? Or the business could create a separate section for articles. Personally, I don’t like to link to blogs from the Best of Web articles section in the e-mail newsletters. But if a site that has an articles section, I’ll link to it (if the article is good enough, of course). What do you think about articles vs. blog posts?
