Net Rage - and our bid to avoid it
I’ve been giving careful attention to a study by the Catalyst Group on how blogs can cause outbursts of ‘net rage’ in some users. We wouldn’t want that to happen here, so I’ve spent some time making small changes to our site in order to avoid it.
Catalyst arranged for a focus group of non-techie types to look at one of BusinessWeek’s excellent blogs. The responses should seriously interest anyone who runs a blog.
Readers were baffled by the panoply of blog jargon. They didnt know what to make of RSS, trackbacks, permalinks, etc. And who can blame them? I remember it took me a while to penetrate these mysteries.
Comments had them stumped too. They weren’t sure what would happen if they submitted one. Would it appear right away? Would only some comments appear? The truth is that different sites have different policies, so even an experienced blogger can’t always be sure.
As a result, I’ve taken up the rule, ‘Where possible, avoid jargon, where it isn’t, explain.’ You will notice little labels appearing here and there. I hope they are useful but unobtrusive.
The test group had trouble finding the home page, or when they did find it, they didn’t see why it was the home page. I’m not quite sure if this is a problem for us. The main page of our blog is called ‘Latest Posts’. I hope that people will realise that it is the best page to bookmark, on the basis that it’s updated most regularly.
Readers were also unsure where to look for related posts. I’ve altered our site to make it clear which category each page is filed under.
Some readers didn’t even realise that they were reading a blog or that it was meant to be different from the main BusinessWeek site. I don’t think we have that problem. You will note, we call this section ‘The Angel Blog’ and it has its own design. But I could see how this could be a problem with a news site. A blog is more personal in its tone, but it isn’t that different from a magazine.
All this seems to give rise to an implicit question – ‘What exactly is a blog?’ I hope that most of us know one when we see one, but how? That’s a philosophical question that I intend to address in a ‘related’ post.
(Angry woman picture by JynMeyerDesign)
