Why I Should Post More often....


Well, according to the extremely useful website, useit.com, by Jakob Nielsen, arguably the top usability guru on the planet, most of the people just read net stuff passively. So they're depending on us writers....

I know my readers would like to see more of my writing, but I've been pretty busy. Still, I'm going to try to force a more frequent comment schedule here and see how it goes.

Dr Nielsen's statistics, which suggest that 90% of internet communities and 95% of the blogosphere is made up of non-posting lurkers, seems to gibe with my empirical (or perhaps, I should say anecdotal) data. I'm a member of two online communities where I post from time to time, and an email list, but both communities (one aviation, and one not) and the list have a hard core of very heavy posters, a core of occasional posters, and a main body of perma-lurkers. The net and the 'sphere taken as a whole seem to break down roughly 90-9-1 in terms of percent of lurkers, occasional posters, and habitual or heavy posters, he reports; my data gibes.

In his October 9th post, Jakob discusses this phenomenon, and teases out what it means to the sponsors and members of such communities. He also offers some intriguing examples of self-generating communitarian information, using as an example the way your choices at Amazon.com all feed into the "people who looked at this also bought..." link (one I have found helpful in the past). There's a lot more in his link, and his weekly Alertbox column on his site is do-not-miss important.

Again, my goal is to resume near-daily blogging, so hang in there to see some (grin).

I'd like to express thanks to all who have commented on how they miss my writing at Aero-News (you know who you are). I had to wind it up with them because of my other commitments, particularly military service, which is a jealous master indeed. I just had to pay a small fortune to have junk sewn on an Army green uniform that I will wear to the unit Christmas party... and which will probably be obsolete by the next Christmas party. Even though it's years old, I can squeeze into it... thanks to my 100-100 project (which I'll post on soon... some victories, some... not so much).

Who knows where I'll wind up when I hang the soldier suit up again? (And yes, I'll be seeking outlets for my humble writing talents).

Posted: Thursday - November 30, 2006 at 04:42 PM          

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