Nielsen doesn’t get it

Jakob Nielsen’s words were the bible of my web design (and I take an authoritative view of the Bible) when I first started putting web pages together back in the late ’90s. I have very dog-eared copy of his book Designing Web Usability and read every article on his web site.

Unfortunately, I think he may be losing it. His latest alertbox, Write Articles, Not Blog Postings, trashes web 2.0 and how web sites and blogs create conversations. He insists that the authority of well written article far exceeds the value from the realism of the conversation that a good blog will create (this blog is NOT an example of that kind of conversation). I have to admit that the Google search algorithm’s tendency to rank blogs higher have helped blogs become more popular, but that was a reason to blog in the search driven era of the Internet that we just passed out of and doesn’t account for the conversation driven blogs we are now seeing. It shouldn’t surprise me that he doesn’t get it. This is probably the first alertbox that I clicked through on all year (and that is just because everyone else is trashing him for it).

I sure hope Steve Krug understands how the web is evolving.

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