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07.18.07
Blogs & Articles: Dialogs & Monologues
 By
Steven Bradley
Jakob Nielson recently published an Alerbox article, Write Articles, Not Blog Postings. and, as is often the case when Jakob offers something, not everyone agrees with him or agrees completely.
He does make some valid points, but also seems to show a lack of understanding about what a blog is.
Yuri wrote a very good follow up post for YOUmoz, Which Content to Create: Expert Articles or Shallow Blog Posts? and Chris Garrett added a few thoughts before asking readers, What is a Blog Post Really?. Both are worthwhile reads and have generated some interesting and insightful comments.
Nieslen does make some good points. He urges you to create content that is
* in-depth
* beyond the abilities of your competition
* well researched
No one would argue that the more value you can provide in your content the better off both you and your visitors will be. We should all strive to produce quality to the best of our abilities. Jakob is pushing for quality over quantity, which is something I firmly believe. He also rightfully argues that more quality places you higher up the chain of experts in your industry and has greater potential to convert readers into clients and customers.
Another of his points is that it will be less an investment in time to write fewer great articles than it will be to write a range of quality blog posts. A given article will take longer to write than a given post, but because you're writing fewer of them you end up spending less time overall. All of these make sense and I don't disagree.
But there's more to the story.
Where Jakob Misses The Mark
I think Jakob misses the mark in two main areas. One is the assumption that more automatically means better. The best blog post, article, essay, short story, or novel is as long as it needs to be. Adding a few hundred pages to "The Old Man and the Sea" wouldn't make it any better. The novel is the perfect length for what it's trying to communicate. So is this:
another couple
mirrors
what used to be
-Ashley Knezevich
There's a lot of information in those 7 words. In just 11 syllables you can feel the pain of a relationship that has long ceased to be what it once was. You can sense the sadness of what might have been. Short does not equal shallow as Nielson seems to think. I've read some very good, yet very short blog posts. I've also read some very long, yet very bad articles.
Nielsen would probably argue that both "The Old Man and the Sea" and the haiku above while short were written more like an article than the quick blog post and he's right of course. The point is that short should not be taken as lacking value.
But where Jakob really goes astray is with the nature of what a blog is. A blog is a conversation on so many different levels. Post are meant to invoke a conversations. Yes, they can educated, but by nature a blog post is a dialog where an article is a monologue. Blog posts are never done. They are continued though the conversations they begin.
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About the Author:
Steven Bradley is a web designer and search engine optimization specialist. Known to many in the webmaster/seo community by the username vangogh, he is the author of TheVanBlog, which focuses on how to build and optimize websites and market them online. |
