Jakob Nielsen on Blogs vs. Newsletters

Hi folks -- here's a bit of contrarian opinion about companies, blogs and RSS feeds in this week's Wall Street Journal (link via Slashdot, which as always, has an interesting discussion thread) from usability guru Jakob Nielsen.

Mr. Nielsen is an influential, but also very polarizing, personality when it comes to Web page design. For example, if you look at his Web site, you'll see that it's pretty much all text, with minimal formatting.

(I'm a big fan of text, and I do agree that a lot of designers get carried away out of touch from users. However, I'm not a purist like Mr. Nielsen. In fact, I think his site's main page is amazingly annoying, for all its simplicity and speed.)

Anyway, here are a few tidbits from his Wall Street Journal interview, where he gives his opinions on how companies use technology like RSS to talk to users and customers:

• Most people still don't know what "RSS" is. "News feeds" is a better term (a feed lets you subscribe to something; your blog entries, your eBay auctions, your sports scores -- all of these things can have feeds, which you can subscribe to and read in a feed reader. It's a good way to organize information from a bunch of different sources.)
  
  
• There's a place for traditional newsletters; blogs aren't perfect for everything.
  
  
• Blogs are conversations... but only for your most fanatic readers. For more periodic communications, a newsletter on a regular publishing schedule might be better.

Personally, I think Mr. Nielsen is taking a very limited view how companies can use blogs, seeing them strictly as a one-way distribution mechanism ("one-to-many", to use the jargon).

However, that loses the importance of what makes blogs "conversations" -- interactivity; listening to users's feedback, responding to their suggestions, and participating in the broader discussion going on in the world (through comments, links to other blogs, etc.).

If you just want to have a newsletter; well, just have a newsletter. Buteven then, there are still advantages to the blog format -- searchable archives, primarily.

Also, with things like New Entry alerts, the line between a blog entry and a newsletter gets kind of blurred, anyway. And the ability to subscribe to a blog's feed means that if you're already using a feed reader, you can just add that to your routine, instead of going off to e-mail.

Just some food for thought.

Thanks -- Joe
Tags: Jakob Nielsen, newsletters, corporate blogging