louisgray.com - Latest Comments in louisgray.com: In Blogging and RSS, Headlines Can be Make or Break

Re: louisgray.com: In Blogging and RSS, Headlines Can be Make or Break

johney petter — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 07:56:00 -0000

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Re: louisgray.com: In Blogging and RSS, Headlines Can be Make or Break

louisgray — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:29:00 -0000

@edwin, I had thought about mentioning graphics as well. Graphics are an important element, but I didn't want my post to be any longer or less focused. Your reference to non-scanners vs scanners is in line with what I would expect for consumers vs. producers of info. People do change from reading to skimming if they don't have great filters.

@tish, you're right about having a nose for news as well. It's good to know when you're sharing info, breaking news, or following a story from somewhere else.

Re: louisgray.com: In Blogging and RSS, Headlines Can be Make or Break

tish — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 15:21:00 -0000

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Re: louisgray.com: In Blogging and RSS, Headlines Can be Make or Break

tish — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 15:19:00 -0000

Hi Louis,

some good advice here--but you made me giggle a bit, as I'm a female blogger writing on a variety of topics, who's gone pretty far on writing some really funny, keyword loaded headlines over the past few years...

Headlines mean a lot in search--as does how you load the first couple of lines of your post. If you don't rely on social news sites like Digg to get readers (where there's a preponderance of young men digging other young men's stuff) you have to find a variety of ways to goose Google just right. It's a skill that takes a bit of time, something like an old-fashioned "nose for news" (knowing what's hot enough, but not so hot that you'll get squashed by someone else) an old-fashioned "ear" for word rhythms and a big ol'vocabulary.

Oh, and no editor telling you to "be serious." Sometimes the best headlines are the ones that make readers groan just a bit! ;-)

Re: louisgray.com: In Blogging and RSS, Headlines Can be Make or Break

IdoNotes — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 15:11:00 -0000

This is a trend we saw recently on an aggregation site my IdoNotes blog is part of. The titles became immediately important as people scanned looking for topics and eye catching titles only.

@Alan P - filtering is one of the reasons I use Particls since I can blog future content by topic of site in my stream. I am also playing with Tiinker, Streamy and some others in this same fashion.

Re: louisgray.com: In Blogging and RSS, Headlines Can be Make or Break

alan p — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:23:00 -0000

Comes back to the point I made re Friendfeed - this does not solve the fundamental problem.

Any system where the proposed solution is to reduce the art form freedom of the communication is imho intrinsically going in the wrong direction.

Filtering those 900 or so posts before I have to read them is the issue to solve.

I want a filter, not a better firehose.

http://www.broadstuff.com/a...

Re: louisgray.com: In Blogging and RSS, Headlines Can be Make or Break

Nick Bradbury — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:05:00 -0000

Along a similar vein: http://nick.typepad.com/blo...

Re: louisgray.com: In Blogging and RSS, Headlines Can be Make or Break

veeks — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 08:29:00 -0000

This post summarizes the problem that I have been feeling over the last couple of weeks (since i got a FF a/c). I am a very lite reader (< 25 feeds in Google Reader, Techmeme and now FF) - and I struggle to keep up with these.

The last couple of days I have resorted to techmeme and FF - and am picking specific posts to read in detail.

PS: I checked if this post was already up on FF and was not there - so decided to comment here :-) (picked this on techmeme)

Re: louisgray.com: In Blogging and RSS, Headlines Can be Make or Break

Edwin Khodabakchian — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 06:17:00 -0000

Hi Louis,

Sorry to hear about the laptop screen issue.

This is an interesting post. It is very much inline with the behavioral data we have collected when doing usability test on feeddo, specially for what we call scanner/searchers. The other factor which seems to end up being very important is a picture: basically the eye travels from the title to the picture and in about 2-3 seconds the user knows if he or she will read the article of skip to the next one. What we are trying to find out is how this behavior extrapolates to none scanners...and if people as you say adapt to the information fire hose by mutating from non scanners to scanners. What is your thought on that?