Eyalnow's Favorite Links on blog-writing from Diigo

Passive Voice Is Redeemed For Web Headings (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

Tue, 25 Dec 2007 15:44:24 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

Words are usually the main moneymakers on a website. Selecting the first 2 words for your page titles is probably the highest-impact ROI-boosting design decision you make in a Web project. Front-loading important keywords trumps most other design considerations.

Avoid repeating any headline words in the summary, except for the most important one or two keywords. You can repeat these halfway through the summary to reinforce them for people who scanned past them in the headline.

Given that users often read only a couple of words from each text element, you should reduce duplication of salient keywords.

Don't use the same initial keywords in your headline and summary. You have 4 words to make your point, so use 4 different words.

Users scan Web content in an F-pattern, and often read only the first 2 words of a paragraph. What are the first two words of my draft deck? "Yahoo Finance" — which has zero information scent for article's target audience.

Usability increases when users need fewer mental transformations to convert a sentence into actionable understanding.

When structuring a sentence, active voice ("Actor does X to Object") is usually better than passive voice ("Object has X done to it by Actor") because it more directly represents the action. As a result, readers don't have to jump through as many cognitive hoops when trying to understand what's going on.

For the same reason, it's usually better to write a positive statement ("do X") than a negative statement ("avoid Y"), and it's almost always horrible to use double negatives ("avoid not doing X"). Again, the simpler the translation between the text and the user's mental model, the easier the writing is to understand.

Summary:
Active voice is best for most Web content, but using passive voice can let you front-load important keywords in headings, blurbs, and lead sentences. This enhances scannability and thus SEO effectiveness.

Tags: blog-writing grammar seo usability web-writing

Posted by: eyalnow

Writing Inverted Pyramids in Cyberspace (Alertbox)

Tue, 25 Dec 2007 08:50:56 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

On the Web, the inverted pyramid becomes even more important since we know from several user studies that users don't scroll,(*) so they will very frequently be left to read only the top part of an article.

Journalists have long adhered to the inverse approach: start the article by telling the reader the conclusion ("After long debate, the Assembly voted to increase state taxes by 10 percent"), follow by the most important supporting information, and end by giving the background. This style is known as the inverted pyramid for the simple reason that it turns the traditional pyramid style around. Inverted-pyramid writing is useful for newspapers because readers can stop at any time and will still get the most important parts of the article.

Tags: blog-writing usability web-writing writing

Posted by: eyalnow

Writing for the Web (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

Tue, 25 Dec 2007 08:33:43 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

Each hypertext page should be written according to the "inverse pyramid" principle and start with a short conclusion so that users can get the gist of the page even if they don't read all of it.

split the information into coherent chunks that each focus on a certain topic.

Hypertext Structure

Make text short without sacrificing depth of content by splitting the information up into multiple nodes connected by hypertext links. Each page can be brief and yet the full hyperspace can contain much more information than would be feasible in a printed article. Long and detailed background information can be relegated to secondary pages; similarly, information of interest to a minority of readers can be made available through a link without penalizing those readers who don't want it.

Tags: blog-writing usability web-writing

Posted by: eyalnow

10 Ways to Eliminate the Echo Chamber ~ Chris Pirillo

Tue, 25 Dec 2007 07:57:28 -0000

how to be original and creative in blogging

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

When you force yourself to do something that you don’t understand, the results might be messy - but they’ll be genuine.

Tags: advice blog-writing blogging blogosphere critical-thinking

Posted by: eyalnow

Coding Horror: Thirteen Blog Clichés

Tue, 25 Dec 2007 05:03:38 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

Besides, It's an open secret in the blogging community that the comments are often better than the original blog entry itself.

The sum total of community contributions is far more useful than any one thing you'll ever write.

No Comments Allowed

A blog without comments is not a blog.

Top (n) Lists

Yes, exactly like this one.

The problem with Top (n) Lists is that they become a substitute for critical thinking,

If all you can find to talk about is what's already popular, you're not trying hard enough. Form your own opinion. Do your own research. Go out of your way to blaze a new trail and create something we haven't already seen hundreds of times before.

if everyone else is talking about it, that means you should avoid talking about it. Switch things up. Seek out uncommon sites with unique information. Dig down to original sources

Blogging About Blogging

I find meta-blogging -- blogging about blogging -- incredibly boring.

Sorry I Haven't Written in a While

If you haven't posted anything new to your blog in a while, don't waste our time with apologies. Just write! The best apology is new and improved content. Maybe with a wee bit more consistency this time, though.

It's OK to be yourself; at some level, it is a cult of personality: people are reading not only because your content is useful to them, but because they like you. It's normal to inject a regular dose of yourself into the conversation.

But like Tabasco sauce and other powerful seasonings, a little YOU goes a long way. A really long way. Write accordingly.

This Ain't Your Diary

It is almost never in the reader's interest to see advertisements, so my advice is to tread very lightly, and be respectful of your audience. Bad advertising is so prevalent that if you take the time to advertise responsibly, you may find that readers appreciate you for it.

The reality is that tag cloud visualizations are chaotic, noisy, and unusable. Keep the tagging, lose the cloud. A simple sorted list of tags, along with the number of posts associated with each tag, is much more effective.

Citing your references and influences is a great and necessary thing, but obsessively listing every single blog you read-- the so-called "blogroll"-- is just noise.

And do your readers really want to see pictures of the last 10 visitors to your blog?

Blogs work because they're simple. When we clutter up our blogs with a zillion widgets, features, and add-ons, we're destroying an essential part of what makes blogs worthwhile.

No Information on the Author

As the old adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But you should no more insert a random image into your writing than you would insert a thousand random words into your writing. I don't care how beautiful your photographs are, it's a terrible, irresponsible practice that distracts and harms readability.

Random Images Arbitrarily Inserted In Text

One of the cardinal rules of web writing is to avoid large blocks of text. There are plenty of excellent web writing guides that exhort you to break up your text, using bullets, numbered lists, quotes, paragraph breaks, images-- anything, anything to avoid creating an intimidating wall of dense, impenetrable text.

The Useless Calendar Widget

Tags: advise blog-writing blogging writing

Posted by: eyalnow