BuzzMachine

The WSJ’s Lee Gomes, who needs some schooling in the ways of the customer-controlled internet, goes to the wrong teacher: Jakob Nielsen, the self-declared usability guru who has the ugliest, least-usable homepage I’ve seen since 1996 and who hasn’t advanced his shtick since about then. In their Q&A, Nielsen sticks to his guns pushing email newsletters (I haven’t subscribed to once since about 2002, myself and not being able to get rid of half of them that I no longer read I now mark them as spam and never open them) over these newfangled RSS feeds and blogs:

Q: Can’t blogs do the same thing [as email newsletters]?

A: Certainly you can have blogs that function as newsletters, updated on a regular basis. But they don’t tend to do that. They don’t tend to have that same sort of publishing discipline: having a publication schedule and surveying this week’s or this day’s events. They could, of course, but they don’t tend to.

Yes, it’s too bad you can’t rely on them to be updated.

Q:
What you are saying is heresy to some bloggers, who insist it’s very important to use blogs to have a “conversation” with customers.

A: That will work only for the people who are most fanatic, who are engaged so much that they will go and check out these blogs all the time. There are definitely some people who do that — they are a small fraction. A much larger part of the population is not into that so much. The Internet is not that important to them. It’s a support tool for them. Bloggers tend to be all one extreme edge. It’s really dangerous to design for a technical elite. We have to design for a broad majority of users.

Fanatics? Extreme? Dangerous? Makes us sound like outlaws. Blogs are just web pages (better designed and more usable than Nielsen’s own) and the tens of millions who write and read them are no longer the fanatic edge.

: LATER: In the comments, Nielsen responds:

You are making exactly the mistake I warned against in this interview: You are extrapolating from your personal experience. This is invalid. You are not an average user. The only way to get insights into these issues is to conduct user research with a broader set of people who have a range of backgrounds and levels of experience.

Also note that the interview is an ultra-short summary of a 544-page research report with 165 design guidelines for email newsletters, so there is much more depth to this research than those short quotes.

And I respond, in turn:

Jakob,

Thanks for the response.

I think you are extrapolating from your past. This, too, is invalid.

The media world is changing rabidly and I think it is a dangerous mistake to discourage media from changing, too. Who would have thought even a year ago that the BBC, The Guardian, CNN, CBS, and other major media would need to run to catch up with this wacky thing called the podcast — and that once they did catch up, they’d serve them to large and devoted audiences.

And who says we need to create for the average anymore? Who the hell is average? No one is. The beauty of this new world is that we can create and serve in many ways for many people and needs and interests.

You want to keep sending out email newsletters (though I’d challenge their effectiveness in a spammed technology where the open vs. send rates I’ve seen keep getting worse)? Absolutely. But why not also offer RSS? Why not also blog? Why tell people not to do these things and not to offer their public these options when they can so easily do it? That, I think, is dangerous advice.

And when are you going to take advantage of advances in web technology and aesthetics to at least update your homepage?

I’m not sure why I’d pay someone $398 for 165 design guidelines when this is his sense of design and usability.

As Kirk also points out in the comments, RSS is going mainstream in IE7 and lots of other technologies. Just as many people reading blogs don’t know or need to care whether they are reading blogs, so will many people use RSS and not know they’re using it. Don’t want to call it RSS? I’ll let you battle that one with Dave Winer. Call it what you will, it is a useful technology that spreading rapidly.

Nick Kristof has a terrific column in The New York Times today on the power of blogs and the internet to challenge Chinese dictatorship. Yes, it’s behind the Great Wall of New York. But I’ll quote some good bits.

Kristof starts his own blogs in China and posts all kinds of things that censors should consider inflammatory — about imprisoned journalists, corruption, Falun Gong, and Tiananmen Square. The censors put asterisks on a few words but the posts stay up. And Kristof says:

All this underscores, I think, that China is not the police state that its leaders sometimes would like it to be; the Communist Party’s monopoly on information is crumbling, and its monopoly on power will follow. The Internet is chipping away relentlessly at the Party, for even 30,000 censors can’t keep up with 120 million Chinese Netizens. With the Internet, China is developing for the first time in 4,000 years of history a powerful independent institution that offers checks and balances on the emperors.

It’s not that President Hu Jintao grants these freedoms, for he has arrested dozens of cyberdissidents as well as journalists. But the Internet is just too big and complex for State Security to control, and so the Web is beginning to assume the watchdog role filled by the news media in freer countries. . . .

He tells the story of blogger Li Xinde, whom he has covered before, going around China “reporting on corruption and human-rights abuses.” In a great game of political wack-a-mole, Mr. Li keeps popping up. He told Kristof:
“They can keep closing sites, but they never catch up. You can’t stop the Yellow River from flowing, and you can’t block the bloggers.”

Put that on a T-shirt and wear it in the Forbidden City.

Kristof concludes:

China’s leaders decided years ago to accept technologies even if they are capable of subversive uses: photocopiers and fax machines at first, and now laptops and text messaging. The upshot is that China is much freer than its rulers would like.

To me, this trend looks unstoppable. I don’t see how the Communist Party dictatorship can long survive the Internet, at a time when a single blog can start a prairie fire.

: These movements and technologies need our support. That’s why I’ve been lambasting or lampooning Yahoo and Google executives over their China policies.

But at last week’s Hyperlinked Society conference, I spent a little time with people who know one helluva lot more about this issue than I do, including Xiao Qiang of the UC-Berkeley China Internet Project and Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices. I won’t attempt to say what they say for fear of misquoting them. I’ll just give you my own thoughts. First, I’ll try to capture the back-and-forth we see on China and the internet:

The company lines we keep hearing from those who do business in China are (1) that the Chinese people are better off with a crippled internet than no internet at all, and (2) that these companies need to follow local laws. The other line we sometimes hear is that the Chinese people don’t care about politics and don’t want or need these freedoms, but I won’t dignify that with a response.

The problem with hiding behind these company lines is simply that if you never say no to the Chinese government, they will keep doing what they do. Not saying no to them is saying yes.

Many of us wish these companies would take the risk of saying no when China’s dictators demand information that might send people to jail or cripple their services. But the companies and their defenders reply they these are businesses that have an obligation to their shareholders to make money; they can’t pull out of China or even risk having to. Some of us say in return that these companies need to have an ethical compass or else they are damaging not only their ability to look at themselves in the mirror in the morning but also their brands and reputations around the globe — and that is, indeed, a business issue.

But I think it is also up to us to put countervailing pressure, to give these companies cover. The problem in our own First Amendment fight against the so-called Parents Television Council and its lapdogs at the FCC and in Congress is that no one wants to vote in favor of the First Amendment when they can be accused of voting for smut. We need to give them cover; we need to demand our freedom of speech. At a much more urgent level, the same is true for internet companies doing business in China.

It’s fair to say that perhaps these companies should not be expected to do this on their own — to stand up to the world’s biggest dictatorship and their shareholders at the same time, just because they want to be decent. So perhaps it is up to us to put that pressure on by asking that they stand up for principle to protect their trusted relationships with us — their brands and businesses, in short. I’m not talking boycotts and nasty campaigns. Think of this less as an attack on the companies and more as a favor to them. We need to help them out by giving the a reason to stand up and have guts. I’m simply saying that when they try to say no to the Chinese dictators, they need a reason why — because of the pressure around the world supporting freedom of speech for everyone.

That means the first step is to state those principles. I think Amnesty International made a good first step at its Irrepressible.info:

I believe the Internet should be a force for political freedom, not repression. People have the right to seek and receive information and to express their peaceful beliefs online without fear or interference. I call on governments to stop the unwarranted restriction of freedom of expression on the Internet – and on companies to stop helping them do it.

Howie Kurtz calls bullshit on all the scare stories coming out about MySpace et al. If the kids aren’t getting attacked by scary guys from horror movies, they’re embarrassing themselves for life:

I’m getting a little tired of reading all these “exposes” of Facebook and MySpace.

Hardly a week goes by without some newscast or newspaper discovering that it can be hazardous to the college or professional careers of young people to post pictures of themselves engaged in drinking, drugging, loving or other racy activity that might be frowned upon by some adult in a position of authority.

Okay, we get it. Hasn’t dumb judgment always been hazardous to your professional health?

It’s a legitimate story, but I detect a faint whiff of Old Media getting all exercised about the terrible dangers of New Media–why are all those kids wasting their time blabbing on these social sites?–rather than figuring out how to appeal to their young fans.

He goes on to talk about Wonkette’s exposes of politicians’ kids acting drunk and dumb. And, yes, those indiscretions of youth that, in my case, are lost in the ether of bad memory are now recorded forever by Brewster Kahle.

In the future, your past is your future. But the good thing is, everybody’s embarrassing moments will now be recorded for posterity. We’re even.

If I were a sociologist, I’d be studying the cultural differences in blogging behavior and attitudes. Every nation approaches blogging differently but I don’t think we know why. The Telegraph Media Group just conducted a survey across various countries and found, according to the Guardian (can’t find the story at the Telegraph):

According to the research, just 13% of those surveyed in Britain had read an individual’s blog in the past week, compared with 40% in the US, 25% in France and 12% in Denmark.

Newspaper blogs were even less popular, the study of more than 9,000 readers of websites and newspapers found.

But keep in mind that there are also a lot fewer newspaper blogs than personal blogs, so I’d say these numbers are good for the papers.

Just 12% of UK readers had read a newspaper blog in the past week, compared with 24% in America, 10% in France and 9% in Denmark.

And 95% of those surveyed in the US said they had used a website for news in the past week, compared with 89% in Britain, 81% in France and 78% in Denmark.

I believe that’s a much higher number than I’ve seen in other surveys. I’d like to see how they define news in the survey.

The lowest levels of response were for people who had actually written their own blog - 3% in Britain and Denmark, 7% in the US and 8% in France.

“There’s a reserved nature in the British market when it comes to writing a blog,” said a source at the Telegraph Media Group, which commissioned the survey.

I’ve heard many theories about why people blog less in the UK. One theory in the UK is that there are already outlets of opinion in papers while in the U.S. we have our monolithic monopolies in most cities. Another is that we’re just different. We’re not reserved.

: A while back, Tim Dunlop speculates about the differences between the American and Australian blog worlds.