« Insuring OSS liability | Main | Chilly »
August 16, 2005
Finding things in blogs
Shel Holtz wrote an article for webpronews.com on the difficulty of finding things in blogs. One of Shel's examples:
Sun Microsystems keeps all of its blogs on one page, but they're not organized in any way that makes sense. You can see recent posts to any blog along with a listing of "Hot Blogs" (dear God, when are we going to see an end to the overuse of the word "hot" on the web?). But if you're looking for a blog on, say, Java Studio Creator, you're back to using the search engine.
Dude, if you know what you're looking for, why are you browsing? Would you force yourself to read a whole book if you know you'll find the keyword you're looking for in the index?
You can get right to things at Google. Check out Java Studio Creator site:blogs.sun.com.
IMHO, the way to make information easier to find online is the present it in a standard format the bots can index, and maybe, if necessary, keep the page chunks from being too big for human beings to handle. Unless you're writing a web based application for specific user tasks, why do you presume someone could know beforehand what somebody else is going to be trying to find?
Posted by Mark at August 16, 2005 08:36 AM