ClappingTree’s Web 2.0

Top 10 Weblog Design Mistakes according to usability guru Jakob Nielsen:

1. No Author Biographies (trust: add a descriptive ‘About’ page)
2. No Author Photo (credibility, recognition)
3. Nondescript Posting Titles (time: create microcontent)
4. Links Don’t Say Where They Go (anticipation: use link titles)
5. Classic Hits are Buried (time: add highlights)
6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation (time: use categories)
7. Irregular Publishing Frequency (anticipation)
8. Mixing Topics (recognition: carve niche)
9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss (future value)
10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service (future value: readership, links, search engine ranking)

Looks like i’d better do something about points 1., 2. and 5.

Interesting piece of information from a recent report in BusinessWeek Online (curiously dated November 28, 2005), dubbing wikis as “Killer Wikis”:

…it’s easy-to-use and practically free wikis that proponents say offer the promise of collaboration beyond e-mail, even though big editing kinks remain and other quirks and security flaws are sure to surface. Internet research firm Gartner Group predicts that wikis will become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009. At Ann Arbor (Mich.)-based Soar Technology Inc., an artificial-intelligence company that works on projects for the Office of Naval Research, wikis enable the company to slash in half the time it takes to complete projects. Soar engineer Jacob Crossman says that’s because the wikis eliminate the usual flurry of back-and-forth attachments and resulting document-version confusion that’s rife in e-mail. At Dresdner, Rangaswami says that among the earliest and most aggressive adopters, e-mail volume on related projects is down 75%; meeting times have been whacked in half.

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