With customary aplomb, William Safire performs a round-up of the blogging lexicon. “This brief survey—a labor of link love—was conducted by means of blogging. Thanks to the blogerati who shot my query around the Web asking for jargon, a solicitation that N’Gai Croal, technology editor at Newsweek, calls blegging.”
In State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 2: Beyond Search, author David Sifry writes, “I want to go a level or two deeper than just thinking about the blogosphere as an A-List and The Long Tail—for that’s far too simplistic, and leaves out some of the most interesting blogs and bloggers out there. This realm of publishing, which I call “The Magic Middle” of the attention curve, highlights some of the most interesting and influential bloggers and publishers that are often writing about topics that are topical or niche.
We understand what the Pajamas Media company is—a banding together of some A-list bloggers to leverage their web stardom into something new and bigger— but what is the website? A sort of human-edited Technorati?
Today their top story is something about Spielberg’s Munich. There’s a “next” button. Next what? Next featured story? Next page on this featured story? We click to find out. It’s another story, “Americans demand the US Senate schedule hearings on Iran”, but while both stories appear on the “top stories” list on the left, this is not the order in which they are listed.
A somewhat more informative link than “next” would have been nice—even “and now for something completely different” would have been marginally more helpful.
What follows below onscreen is the same on both pages, so we guess that the top green-shaded box is horizontal navigation.
We notice that the first item in the list entitled “Main” is “About Us”. Our suspicion is that the brains here could not mesh together properly and were all too polite to say so and too self-sufficient to care too much.
Did anybody quit anything else to do this?
Update 23 Jan: Aha, they’ve addressed every one of these issues, reverting to a more intuitive blog format. I’ll be visiting.
