A look at the visual growth of weblogs.

In the primordial days of web journalism, criticism was easy because the targets were few. "I have not read every last article in this issue since doing so would be too hard to endure. Slate is not designed for online reading: the feature articles are all long, long, long" cried web usability guru Jakob Nielson in a 1996 review. For the first few years of the web Nielsen had mostly reviewed "navigation pages"– the introductory page of a website which has navication links to other pages– and was aghast that users would have to scroll the page to find navication links off the screen. He amended the Slate analysis just a month later, cheering that Slate had compacted its home page. Within due time, Nielsen relaxed his early guidelines, after finding that users, had in fact, scrolled. "Thus, pages that can be markedly improved with a scrolling design may be made as long as necessary, though it should be a rare exception to go beyond three screenfulls on an average monitor." (see "Changes in Web Usability Since 1994").

Surveying the growing community of blogs, I wonder whether Nielsen is still relevant; after all, the very first page that a user sees in a website could be considered the "navigation page". I compared some of the leading Internet news sites & blogs using to determine how many "screenfulls" they were in fact showing:

UseIt	Slate	Salon	NY Times	Wired News	CNN	BBC	Clark site	Clark blog	Dean site	Dean blog	Kaus	TPM	NMM	Gillmor eJournal	Udell	Slashdot	Scripting News
3	5	7	4.5	2	2	1	3	7	5	14.5	25	45	100	12	9	5	2.5
Each pixel on the represents 100 pixels of "canvas size", so represents 800px– which is how long a screen would look if your monitor resolution is 1280×1024 (subtracting in for toolbars, status bar, etc.) To see more, you’d have to page down. I’ve indicated the number of "pages" at the bottom. Also, the blue data at top indicates the number of page-screens which were updated in the last 24 hours. This research was done by looking at these websites on 1/18/2004. The daily tallies for the sites with weekly updated were taken by roughly averaging the length of content for each day of the previous week. The graph layout is unusual, but it was partly inspired by a recent article in the Times which illustrated the growing length of feature film credits.

 

Here’s some conclusions I can draw:

First, everybody shows 1-2 page lengths of daily content, irrespective of how much older content shown. The Internet news sites, on the left side of the graph, tend to feature links to their stories, some with small lead-ins. The personal blogs at right tend to include the entire stories on the front page, leading to a long page size. (The New Media Musings , by JD Lasica, editor of the Online Journalism Review at USC’s Annenberg School, seems to not have shelved any of his old content; the effect is that his page takes about half-a-minute to load and display, even via broadband). Caught in the middle are the campaign sites, which now come in pairs (edited site, and blogged site). Are they news sites, or are they personal journals?

Let’s get an idea of what it means to have a long page. It’s a bit ironic that long format suggests a linear narrative– which the hypertext revolution, through the web, was supposed to overthrow by linking small information nodes to eachother. Long blogs suggest the "dance club remix" effect, wherein recording companies in the 1970’s began recording alternate versions of hits songs that had multiple beats and didn’t fade out, and thus lent themselves to be mixed by club DJ’s into nonstop music, which kept people from leaving the dance floor. So maybe bloggers feel that that they are radio broadcasters, keeping their readers interest through different stories, simply because the format locks the audience’s attention (as Andrew Sullivan observed, a blog is "somewhere between writing a column and talk radio")

But there’s no rule. Scripting News, the pioneering weblog by Dave Winer, now shows just day at a time. I have not been a regular reader of Scripting News, so I am not sure whether a multiple-day "reverse chronological" presentation had been used. (In an October 2001 post, "The History of Weblogs", Winer accredited the first weblog to be that of the very first web page, by Tim Berners-Lee. But here Winer’s classification of a blog tarries with a general understanding of it.) Another pioneering website which predated the blog revolution is Slashdot, which has always been content to merely provide lead-ins to their new stories.

The effect of long weblogs on readers may be a threat of information overload. New readers to a blog may see the long page and worry that they have to read all of it, else they’ll be remain misinformed; whereas a short page– one which favors links over text– allows a reader to skim. In addition, long weblogs may make the writer absolve the practice of linking to previous stories they’ve written. This is just a hypothesis at this point, though I’ll note that Timothy Noah, the author of Slate’s nonblog "Chatterbox" column, is very diligent about his linking). Publishers should be aiming to produce deep sites which reflect revisitations of past topics. The long format instead may focus too much on the ephemeral.

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Update, January 12, 2006: Well last October, Nielsen did get to weblog design last October. And he forgot his old page-length rule. Also, I py much don’t read any of those blogs these days. Two years ago I had no idea how to find them, and was struggling to complete the list. See the Webzine Format for a compact alternative.