Weblogs Enable User-Centric Sites
by Kristoffer Bohmann, June 22, 2000
Weblogs give users information from multiple sources in one page.
Weblogs list described hyperlinks to content on the Web. The Bohmann.dk homepage may in fact be called a weblog. I have spotted several alternative weblogs:
- My.Userland.Com lists an overwhelming amount of unfiltered news that may be personalized. Userland have further gathered four content providers into one site. Nice!
- Tomalak.org publish well-written link descriptions and is highly focused at strategic Web design news. Personalization is hardly needed here.
- MyYahoo (registration required) allow users to retrieve one-line link descriptions to news about business, sport, technology, and other areas. Most news providers are highly respected media companies.
While this technology is developing in the news industry it has high potential in ecommerce. For instance, users may get up-to-date information about product introductions in a specific market from multiple, independent sources. I predict that weblogs will become core to information about most products in just a few years.
Web Scripting
Weblogs are based on Web scripting technology. A noteworthy software packages is Frontier from Userland. I tested a free version that automates a lot of administrative writer's work such as:
- posting articles using the correct template,
- posting and removing links to articles on overview pages,
- keeping track of outgoing links and link titles,
- handle meta tags that describe page content to search engines
- changing page design in one place, and so on.
Further, authors can publish the same story on multiple sites and become a player in the online publishing industry.
Still, the Frontier user interface is difficult to use. This is mainly so as functionalities have insufficient names and descriptions (what is a "scratchpad" and a "filter"?), while help is limited in my version.
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About the Author
Kristoffer Bohmann (biography) M.Sc. thinks and writes about high-quality user experiences. His philosophy: Users first. You can contact him at kristoffer@bohmann.dk. |
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