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.

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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.

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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).

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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?.

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