[Air-l] blogs and value

jeremy hunsinger jhuns at vt.edu
Wed Apr 27 07:01:54 PDT 2005


one of my daily reads  Jim Romensko's obscure store just moved from 
being an independently designed newsite to a typepad blog.  this struck 
me immediately as a devaluation of the site because it had become 'just 
another blog', whereas before It was a uniquely designed news-site that 
people had to visit to read.  In that they had to visit it to read it, 
it was experienced as a whole, and its parts were always in relation to 
one another as organized on the page, which gave some added value.    
designwise i think the argument is obvious and has been made many times 
about the 'value-added' of good design and layout, however, the thing 
with blogs is that we can read them via rss and we never need to see 
the original design at all, or perhaps we need to see it once in a 
while, but certainly not every day.  Also, when blogs are read via rss, 
they parts need not be read in direction relation to each other as a 
whole, but can be read mixed with unlimited other blog-feeds, in the 
romenesko case, i think this lowers the overall sense of irony and 
humor involved.

I'm wondering if other people are exploring this aspect of perceived 
value in blogging as compared to other online media, and if so, are 
there any studies available, and if not, would someone be interested in 
working on developing a project in this direction. 
  




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