How Not To Blog ?

I don't get what the new trend is making some category terms large than others, a la Technorati peanut butter sandwiches. I'd rather encounter an old X-10 minicam popup than to see that gruel on your website. Threadwatch tells us that Folksonomic tagging is good for search marketers, but is it good for searchers? Sure, tagging is good for searchers. But making some tags larger than others is not.

What would Amazon look like if it adopted the same system? Pretty horrible (and much more unusable), if you ask me. They'd be much better off just adopting the extensible metadata (tags) and not playing around with the font size.

Yes, some categories have more content than others (obviously).

That doesn't mean that there will be a proportional amount of persons interested in each of those categories. Meaning, most of your visitors will probably be frustrated.

When you treat each category equally you enable the user to make their own decisions about what they want to see. Some of the Technorati tags on the tags page, for example, are very difficult to see. Some of them aren't even listed (e.g., 'wikipedia'). But, nevermind, it looks cool. And it's new.

These are the same people (e.g., David Sifry of Technorati) who preach about the Long Tail of searching and the web, but don't understand the concept of niche visitors.

Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.

Don't be too shy to admit your stupidity.