Dave Winer suggests a different approach to blog comments, treating them as a ‘publication’ rather than a ‘conversation’:

[...] this has led me to an idea that comments could work quite a bit differently and remove the incentives to replay old arguments, and keep the comments focused on the ideas being responded to.

1. A fixed commenting period for each post of 24 hours.

2. Until the period expires, none of the comments would be visible to other commenters.

Read the full suggestion at Scripting News: Proposal: A new kind of blog comment system.

Although there’s not much new here, it’s good to see this kind of list backed-up with multiple research sources. And who would have thought that Stanford have a “Web Credibility Research Site“, by the “Persuasive Tech Lab“? Neat.

…show there are real people behind the site and in the organization. Next, find a way to convey their trustworthiness through images or text. For example, some sites post employee bios that tell about family or hobbies.

Read the full 10-point list at: The Web Credibility Project: Guidelines – Stanford University.

Jakob Nielsen’s latest usability study finds that summaries are usually better than full-articles on corporate blog home pages, though this may flip if your user base has a large percentage of regular visitors (though wouldn’t they just subscribe to the RSS, if technically proficient?).

On corporate blogs, summaries are usually superior to full articles because they let you expose users to a broad selection of topics. Offering more topics increases the likelihood that users will find something that really interests them and thus will click through to read more. (As opposed to leaving.)

Read the full study at: Corporate Blogs: Front Page Structure (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox).

Contentini have posted the results of a content strategist day-rate survey:

Across all experience and $USD day rates, the mean average is $939, the mode average is $1,000 and the median average is $640. When grouping by experience, those with under 5 years command a mean/median rate of $518/$490, and those with 10+ years command a mean/median rate of $1330/$800.

via How Much Does a Content Strategist Cost?.

Make sure you read the comments too, which provide some valuable feedback on potential flaws with the study, but it’s interesting nonetheless:

The final option — pay what you wish, with half the purchase price going to charity — generated big results: purchase rates of 4.49% and an average purchase price of $5.33, resulting in significant profits for the theme park. “When the charity factor is introduced, these casual freeloaders balk at the idea of paying nothing, because it’s more likely to reflect badly on them,”

via How to Maximize Pay-What-You-Wish Pricing – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com.

On editors and “shipping”:

People often think that editors are there to read things and tell people “no.” Saying “no” is a tiny part of the job. Editors are first and foremost there to ship the product without getting sued. They order the raw materials—words, sounds, images—mill them to approved tolerances, and ship. No one wrote a book called Editors: Get Real and Ship or suggested that publishers use agile; they dont live in a “culture” of shipping, any more than we live in a culture of breathing. Its just that not shipping would kill the organism.

via Real Editors Ship Ftrain.com.

A newspaper website has decided to charge a one-off fee of 99c before you can leave a comment, to improve the level of discourse. I remember reading Seth Godin (I think) on the big difference between 0c and 1c (i.e. as soon as a financial transaction comes into it, it’s a whole new game). I actually like the experiment, and it will be interesting to see the short and long term results. What I don’t like so much is the idea of giving over credit card details for something so trivial; hopefully they accept PayPal too.

Anxious to lift an outright ban on comments, The Attleboro (Mass.) Sun-Chronicle has begun requiring two things of online readers who want to leave their thoughts on stories: 99 cents and their real names.

…

Reasonable people may disagree with publisher D’Arconte on whether this step is necessary.  The benefits of allowing anonymous comments are well known and vigorously defended. But what’s interesting is that this newspaper has weighed the pros and cons of anonymity and decided that the costs outweigh the benefits.

via Paper to readers: Comments now cost 99 cents and your name | NetworkWorld.com Community.

This article: about the growing popularity of the colon online. I found this little snippet more interesting though: how words and language usage can spread virally like content. Now: I’m going to stop using the colon for a bit.

So why is our writing suddenly peppered with colons? And where on earth did they come from?

Well, because the Internet is a place where things tend to go “viral.” Videos, songs, funny pictures of cats, forwarded emails, bad jokes–any information that can be transmitted digitally has the potential to snowball.

So, too, with words and acronyms. Have you ever told a friend you’d BRB? Ever LOL’d at a “FAIL”? If not, your child probably has. These words and clusters didn’t  exist in the early nineties, yet for the “text gen” they’re common currency. And, IMHO, they’re also tied to colons.

via The Millions : Colonoscopy: It’s Time to Check Your Colons.

Stephen Fry is my all-time hero of language. I’m aware that he’s not as high-profile in the US as in the UK, so if you don’t know much about him, start by YouTubing A Bit of Fry And Laurie - where you might also spot a younger Dr. House.

Here he is, on the freedom that should be given to language:

But above all let there be pleasure. Let there be textural delight, let there be silken words and flinty words and sodden speeches and soaking speeches and crackling utterance and utterance that quivers and wobbles like rennet. Let there be rapid firecracker phrases and language that oozes like a lake of lava. Words are your birthright. Unlike music, painting, dance and raffia work, you don’t have to be taught any part of language or buy any equipment to use it, all the power of it was in you from the moment the head of daddy’s little wiggler fused with the wall of mummy’s little bubble. So if you’ve got it, use it. Don’t be afraid of it, don’t believe it belongs to anyone else, don’t let anyone bully you into believing that there are rules and secrets of grammar and verbal deployment that you are not privy to. Don’t be humiliated by dinosaurs into thinking yourself inferior because you can’t spell broccoli or moccasins. Just let the words fly from your lips and your pen.

Read the (very long) full article at Don’t Mind Your Language… « The New Adventures of Stephen Fry.

Semi-automating content optimization:

So here’s something devilishly brilliant: The Huffington Post applies A/B testing to some of its headlines. Readers are randomly shown one of two headlines for the same story. After five minutes, which is enough time for such a high-traffic site, the version with the most clicks becomes the wood that everyone sees.

via How The Huffington Post uses real-time testing to write better headlines » Nieman Journalism Lab.