Tuesday, May 25, 2010
A List Apart for People Who Make Websites: Quick and Dirty Remote User Testing
by Nate Bolt
Published in: User Interface Design, Project Management and Workflow, Usability
8 Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers
by Annabel Candy
Do you want to be a successful blogger?
I do. I might be getting a bit obsessed with it, actually.
Post ideas pop into my head unexpectedly. I keep a long running list of ideas for improving my blog.
I also study how the most successful bloggers got where they are, and I pore over every word that they write.
If you want to be a great blogger, you should, too.
A lot of the top bloggers like Brian Clark, Darren Rowse, and Leo
Babauta have shared hundreds of tips about how they made their blogs so successful. But each blogger’s tips are just a little different.
There’s too much advice to follow
So I would read one special report with a great idea and put that into place on my blog. But the next day I’d find a podcast from another top blogger with contradictory advice, so I’d change my blog again. Then I’d come across a third idea from an equally successful blogger, which sent me down a totally new path.
Finally I realized I needed to stop focusing on little things like what plug-ins to use, how to write my About Page, or where to position my ads.
I needed to focus on a bigger picture. I wanted to find out what all these top bloggers had in common. Their mindset, their mental habits.
I spent a lot of time observing, which led to this list of the eight success traits shared by all top bloggers I’ve found. I’m happy to share it with you.
The good news is that even if you don’t have all these personality traits already, most of them can be developed over time. Best of all, if you can cultivate these traits, you’ll become more effective in the rest of your life as well.
1. Effective bloggers are prolific
The first key to being a successful blogger is to write. A lot.
The more you write, the better your writing gets. The more posts you add to your blog, the more juice you’ll get from search engines. And more content means more reader visits to see what’s new.
There’s no way around it; it takes work to be prolific. Effective bloggers work hard. Putting a successful blog together requires a lot of time in front of your computer, and not surfing LOLCats or Twittering about what you had for lunch. Great bloggers put serious time into researching, writing, editing, and planning posts for their blogs.
2. Effective bloggers are concise
It is a truth universally acknowledged by top bloggers; people come to your blog for a reason. Usually because they want to learn something from you.
No one wants to read fluff or blather, especially online.
Top bloggers know how to quickly get people’s attention, how to keep it, and how to make their posts easy to digest.
Most effective bloggers tend toward short posts. They also divide their copy into short paragraphs, and use bullet points or numbered lists to keep the reader scanning. They use compelling subheads so readers can scan for the information they need.
Brevity comes in handy in other areas of life, too. Keep your phone calls short. Pare your email messages down to the essentials. You’ll have more time for creative work, and people will be much more interested in what you have to say.
3. Effective bloggers are analytical
Successful bloggers don’t work or live in a bubble.
They always look to their readers, observing carefully to see what readers care about and respond to.
They study their statistics, so they know where readers come from — what sites, what search engines, what search terms, and even what countries.
They know when they tend to get the most traffic, what kinds of posts are best suited for their audience, and what kinds of headlines get tweeted most often.
Then they tailor the timing, content, layout, and images of their posts to suit their audience.
4. Effective bloggers are lifelong learners
If you’re new to blogging, you’re probably on a steep learning curve at the moment.
Maybe you tell yourself that things will get better when you’ve been doing it longer. There won’t be so much to learn. You’ll have systems in place soon and everything will run smoothly.
Sadly, I think this is a myth. I’ve been using and designing for the Internet for about 15 years, and it keeps changing. Just when you’ve got one element sorted out, something new gets released. Or becomes obsolete. Or mutates in 20 different directions.
If you want to stay ahead in blogging, you have to keep learning.
Fortunately, being curious and wanting to learn keeps you young and your brain active. A love of learning doesn’t just set you up for a successful blog, but for a successful and happy life.
5. Effective bloggers are focused and consistent
Successful bloggers choose a topic and stick to it.
They write consistently about their chosen subject, and with a consistent voice and approach. Even when they write about something that seems to be off-topic, they relate it back to the niche they know their readers are interested in.
Top bloggers are also consistent about timing. Most stick to regular posting schedules. Whether they post three posts a day or two posts a week, their readers know what to expect.
6. Effective bloggers plan ahead
Successful bloggers know where they’re going. They have a master plan and they stick to it. Yes, they adapt based on feedback, but always in service of a vision.
To paraphrase Seth Godin’s recent book Linchpin, “Effective bloggers ship.” Top bloggers don’t waffle for months about the typeface on their upcoming ebook. They may tailor the angle, price, or format to better suit their market. But they don’t let themselves get derailed. They follow the plan.
7. Effective bloggers are persistent
Top bloggers understand that success doesn’t happen overnight. Real success rarely happens quickly.
Time is on your side. To get to the top takes consistency, hard work, serious study, and lots of persistence. Successful bloggers don’t give up.
8. Effective bloggers are self-starters
I’ve been self-employed for years.
I’ve noticed a lot of people like the idea of working from home, working for themselves, being their own boss. But if you want these things, you need to be able to manage yourself.
No one is going to sack you if you’re late. No one reminds you of important deadlines or nags you to get your sales numbers up.
If you want to be a successful blogger, you need to be a self-starter. It’s not enough to have good ideas. You have to act on them.
What trait do you think is most valuable?
What do you think the most important trait of a top blogger is? It might be one of these eight, or something completely different. Let us know in the comments!
About the Author: Annabel Candy is a travel fiend who currently calls Australia home. She has travelled widely and writes a personal improvement blog called Get in the Hot Spot. It’s stuffed with inspiration and tips to help people live their dreams.
The Code4Lib Journal Article: A Principled Approach to Online Publication Listings and Scientific Resource Sharing
Jacquelijn Ringersma, Karin Kastens, Ulla Tschida and Jos van Berkum
The Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Psycholinguistics has developed a service to manage and present the scholarly output of their researchers. The PubMan database manages publication metadata and full-texts of publications published by their scholars. All relevant information regarding a researcher’s work is brought together in this database, including supplementary materials and links to the MPI database for primary research data. The PubMan metadata is harvested into the MPI website CMS (Plone). The system developed for the creation of the publication lists, allows the researcher to create a selection of the harvested data in a variety of formats.
Information Literacy: A Neglected Core Competency
Sharon A. Weiner, Professor and W. Wayne Booker Chair in Information Literacy at Purdue University writes for Educause Quarterly about Information Literacy: A Neglected Core Competency. In her article she discusses the recent report from the researchers at the Information School at the University of Washington titled Lessons Learned: How College Students Seek Information in the Digital Age, and offers these takeaways:
• College students think of information seeking as a rote process and tend to use the same small set of information resources no matter their question.
• Information literacy is essential for lifelong learning and empowers individuals and societies.
• Our educational system should expose students to information literacy from elementary school through postsecondary education so that it is a habit of mind they can call upon throughout their lives.
• Collaborative efforts between faculty, librarians, technology professionals, and others can develop students who graduate with information literacy competency.
- Forest Woody Horton, Jr., (2008). "Understanding Information Literacy: A Primer," UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), 2008. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0015/001570/157020E.pdf
- "The Information Behavior of the Researcher of the Future," A CIBER Briefing Paper, January 11, 2008. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/research/ciber/downloads/ggexecutive.pdf
- Irvin R. Katz, "ETS Research Finds College Students Fall Short in Demonstrating ICT Literacy: National Policy Council to Create National Standards," College & Research Libraries News, vol. 68, no. 1 (January 2007), pp. 35–37. http://crln.acrl.org/content/68/1/35.full.pdf+html
- Anne Marie Perrault, "American Competitiveness in the Internet Age: Report," 2006 Information Literacy Summit, Washington, DC, October 16, 2006. http://www.infolit.org/
- Alison J. Head and Michael B. Eisenberg, "Lessons Learned: How College Students Seek Information in the Digital Age," Project Information Literacy Progress Report, Information School, University of Washington, December 1, 2009. http://projectinfolit.org/pdfs/PIL_Fall2009_Year1Report_12_2009.pdf
- National Leadership Council for Liberal Education and America’s Promise, "College Learning for the New Global Century," Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2007. http://www.aacu.org/leap/documents/GlobalCentury_final.pdf
- See the CIC’s annual report for 2008–2009, "Creative Leadership for Challenging Times." http://www.cic.org/ABOUT/annualreport/annualreport0809.pdf
Inside Higher ED: The Aging of Science
What if key elements of science policy are based on patterns of discovery that no longer exist?
That's the question behind a paper ( http://papers.nber.org/papers/w16002 ) released Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The paper -- by Benjamin Jones, associate professor of management at Northwestern University -- argues that science has changed in key ways. Specifically, it argues that the age at which researchers are able to make breakthroughs has advanced, and that scientists are parts of increasingly larger teams, encouraging narrow specialization. Yet, he argues, science policy (or a lot of it) continues to assume the possibility if not desirability of breakthroughs by a lone young investigator.
Much of the paper focuses on the greater difficulty of making key contributions -- solo -- early in one's career. Jones cites, for example, the growth in the number of journal articles. In 2006, for example, there were 941,000 journal articles published, 90 percent of them in science and engineering, and these articles cited 4,372,000 unique journal articles. With the publication rate growing by 5.5 percent a year, someone able to read only a certain number of articles a year is seeing his or her "fraction of extant knowledge" decreasing by the same percentage.
He then reviews a variety of measures that show the twin trends of an aging and more group-oriented scientist. On age, he notes that:
•During the 20th century, the average age at which researchers made the accomplishments that were later honored with Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine and economics increased by 5.83 years.
•During the 20th century, the average age at which researchers made "great" technological achievements rose by 4.86 years, while the age of those achieving a first patent -- for more average inventors -- went up by 6.57 years.
In exploring the data more fully, Jones finds that the gains are not the result of people living longer, but generally of a decline in "great achievement" in scientists' 20s and 30s. "Peak productivity has increased by about 8 years, with the effect coming entirely from a collapse in productivity at young ages," Jones writes.
Then Jones looks at the teamwork trends, focusing on data for journal articles (since 1955) and patents issued (since 1975). He finds here that the mean size of teams is increasing (across both categories) by 15-20 percent per decade. The growth is nearly universal across scientific fields (including the social sciences). By 2005, he finds that more than 80 percent of science and engineering publications, more than 50 percent of social sciences publications and more than 60 percent of patents had multiple authors or inventors.
While Jones notes that some might view the question of collaborating or working individually as a choice, he argues that the most influential science is increasingly done in teams. Between 1995 and 2005, he writes, group papers had twice as many citations as those authored by individuals. And comparing "home run papers" -- those with at least 100 citations -- team papers are more than four times as likely to produce such impact.
A series of changes may be needed in science policy to reflect these shifts, Jones argues. He notes some efforts already under way at the National Institutes of Health and other funding agencies to reward interdisciplinary research and work by young scholars.
But he also argues for changes in the mindset about science, as expressed in the way discoveries are honored. "Celebrated achievements historically often carry the scientist’s name – Euclidean geometry, Newton’s laws of motion, Mendelian inheritance, and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, to name a few," he writes. Those who award prizes and whose opinions confer prestige should consider that "shifting toward high status and/or financial reward 'team prizes' for particular innovations could help undo the incentive challenges that individual rewards impose," Jones writes.
— Scott Jaschik
The Teaching Professor: Practicing Learner-Centered Teaching in Large Classes
Date: Thursday, 07/15/10
Time: 12:00 - 1:15 PM CDT
Cost: $229 ($254 after 07/08/10)
Three easy ways to register!
Online: http://www.magnapubs.com/calendar/440.html?s=cj&p=email Phone: 800-433-0499 / 608-227-8182
Featured Higher Education Presenter: Carol Hurney, Ph.D.
Practicing Learner-Centered Teaching in Large Classes is a 75-minute audio online seminar presented by a leading expert in learner-centered teaching. The seminar presents a multi-level method that can be tailored to fit any teaching style and classroom.
• View and discuss real-world case studies, which show successful, learner-centered redesigns of large classes.
• Implement strategies to create a manageable structure while simultaneously shifting the balance of power to students.
• Evaluate the impact of learner-centered teaching on student reaction and achievement through the prism of a large introductory general education course.
Plus, why gradual changes pay off in the long run, how grading processes can be easily altered to fit this new paradigm, and the best way to evaluate student feedback. It’s all presented in a participant-centered way. The seminar includes live question and answer, polling to help direct the content, and a constant dialogue between participants and the presenter.
Expert presenter
Dr. Carol Hurney serves as the Executive Director at James Madison University’s Center for Faculty Innovation. She’s the driving force behind campus-wide programs to enhance scholarship, leadership, and service roles of JMU faculty. Dr. Hurney is also an associate professor of Biology and in 2005 was honored as the Distinguished Teacher in General Education.
Inviting the whole team is easy and economical!
Pay just one fee per site, no matter how many people attend. Magna Online Seminars are easily set up in an auditorium, conference room, or private office depending on the crowd. And the best part: no expensive travel or registration fees.
This seminar is designed for:
• Instructors
• Professors
• Department heads
• Deans
• Faculty development staff
Advice - Marian the Cybrarian - The Chronicle of Higher Education
By Thomas H. Benton
For all the concern expressed about the imminent demise of the college library, there may never have been a time when librarians seemed more vital, forward-thinking—even edgy—than they do now.
It's a dated reference, but today's information professionals often remind me more of Ian Malcolm, the "chaos theorist" played by Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park (1993), than of the eyeglass-chain-wearing librarians of yore, if they ever existed in significant numbers. (I have seen only one, Mrs. Evelyn, from my elementary school in the early 70s.)
It's not that many of today's librarians routinely dress in sunglasses and black leather (though some do). It's that, more than any other class of professionals in higher education, librarians possess a comprehensive understanding of the scholarly ecosystem. They know what's going on across the disciplines, among professors and administrators as well as students. No less important, they are often the most informed people when it comes to technological change—its limits as well as its advantages.
Marilyn Johnson's This Book Is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All (HarperCollins, 2010) provides an entertaining, picaresque narrative of her experiences with librarians who, these days, are "wrestling a raucous, multiheaded, madly multiplying beast of exploding information." Ostensibly a gathering of amusing anecdotes about library culture—including the famous performances of precision book-cart drill teams at the convention of the American Library Association—Johnson's book is a stirring defense of the library and librarians, whom she presents as activists defending democracy and the First Amendment, as well as visionaries opening the door to the digital future, while protecting our printed legacy.
As Johnson presents them, librarians may seem aggressively avant-garde, but they are rarely techno-utopians. They understand the chain of events between the butterfly and the hurricane, so to speak, because they have experience with the cultivation of knowledge and with the practical consequences of institutional overreaching. They see the potential of new tools, but they are also the guardians of tradition. From that permanent dialectical struggle, they appear to acquire a mixture of whimsy and wisdom—in addition to a notable taste for eccentric eyewear.
In my experience, librarians almost always pass the beer test: They are among the most likeable people you'll find at any college. They have the intellectual curiosity of academics without the aloofness and attitude often displayed by professors. If you are a stranger on a strange campus, the one person who will always save you is a librarian. They may still shush you in some places, but librarians will also go to the most extraordinary lengths to help you achieve your scholarly goals without asking for any of the credit.
Recently, one of our college's reference librarians drove a student of mine around town on a tour of historic sites to help her with a project that combines archival research with new media. And, earlier today, when I casually mentioned that I was writing this essay, one of our librarians provided me a link to hundreds of relevant resources within minutes. If I send them a student with a problem, not only is it solved, but the student returns with information about resources that I didn't even know existed.
Try depending on a fellow professor to respond to an urgent e-mail message within a week, and you'll begin to understand my appreciation for librarians as colleagues.
As highly professional guides who can lead us through an increasingly tangled bank of information, librarians provide a voice of caution in a period when drastic, irreversible change seems like an easy fix for a concatenation of expensive institutional ailments.
When a major university such as Harvard loses a substantial portion of its endowment, the $165-million budget and 1,200 employees of its 73 libraries begin to seem like low-hanging fruit. One unnamed scientist, quoted in the May-June Harvard Magazine, suggested that the collections of Widener Library—the accumulated holdings of more than three centuries—should be dumped in the Charles River, leading Jonathan Shaw to ask, "What future for libraries?" And, one might ask, "What future for the librarians?"
A balanced answer is provided by Robert Darnton, director of Harvard's University Library and a professor; he is the author or editor of more than 20 volumes on the history of books, particularly in the context of the French Enlightenment, and has been a notable supporter of Harvard's relationship with Google Books. The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (PublicAffairs, 2009) is a collection of essays from the last decade in which Darnton offers an "unashamed apology for the printed word" while assessing the "place of books in the digital environment." He also makes some judicious predictions, some of which are already coming to pass at Harvard and at small colleges like mine.
As someone with experience in print and electronic publishing, Darnton is seeking "common ground" between the Luddite jeremiad and come-to-Jesus techno-millennialism. Just as Corbusier redefined architecture as "machines for living in," Darton suggests that the codex is simply an interface and "the study of books need not be limited to a particular technology." While he sees Google Books as an opportunity to democratize access to information, he also expresses concerns about the potential for monopolistic control over resources originally provided by nonprofit institutions.
One way for such institutions to serve the "Republic of Letters" and to retain a distinct role in the universe of digital information, Darnton observes, is to place the scholarship of faculty members and students online, free for anyone to read. Such an approach can combat the escalating costs of serials that devour more than half of many library-acquisitions budgets, and can expand the potential reach of scholarship in an era in which monographs are becoming too costly to produce. Judging by the online presence of DASH: Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard, that approach has made some promising first steps: The resources offered are extensive, but only a fraction of what could be available.
While Darnton presents digital technology as giving us new opportunities for gaining access to information, he is no advocate of abandoning the printed word. He observes that the "number of books in print goes up every year, currently amounting to more than a million new titles." It's an alarming rate of increase, one that many libraries, such as Harvard's, can deal with only through the use of off-site depositories.
In terms of cost, depository storage of physical books is competitive with digital storage, and, equally important, there are more assurances that the book will be there in 250 years in a form that you can read. Unfortunately, much of our born-digital era will ultimately be lost to history because it was never recorded in the more stable medium of paper. Librarians can observe problems in physical libraries (such as fragments of yellowed paper around copiers), but media obsolescence and bit-rot can go on undetected until someone needs something digital that can no longer be recovered.
I can't even open my dissertation documents from 10 years ago; none of my computers includes a floppy drive.
Much is inevitably overlooked in the process of digitization. For example, Darnton wonders who is preserving our "computer manuals or telephone books" (not that I care now, but maybe my great-grandchildren will)? What seems like trash in one era is treasure in another because nearly every copy was thrown out.
Moreover, one digitized copy of a book does not make all the other copies redundant. Books often contain paratextual information, such as annotations, that can become unexpectedly valuable. I sometimes find the smell of an old book can open up the memories of when I first read it, and Darnton notes that 43 percent of French students "consider smell to be one of the most important qualities of printed books." A scratch-and-sniff sticker on your Kindle won't do the trick.
And, of course, for all its promise, Google will remain burdened by the complexities of copyright law for the foreseeable future, meaning that books that are more recent than 1923 are still protected. And what happens if Google goes bankrupt? No business is too big to fail, as we all know now.
For all those reasons, Darnton believes—and I hope he's right—that physical books will remain with us indefinitely. But, as any collector will tell you, "you can't keep everything," so librarians will face the challenge of "advancing on two fronts: the analog and the digital." They will have to do it all, increasingly through collaboration with other librarians: sharing resources, streamlining interlibrary loans, integrating their catalogs, and managing open-access collections of faculty and student publications.
One strategy that appeals to me, in particular, is giving renewed attention to special collections, even in relatively small libraries. "Google will have scanned nearly everything in standard collections," Darnton observes, "but it will not have penetrated deeply into rare-book rooms and archives, where the most important discoveries are to be made." For example, Hope College has one of the most important collections of unique materials on Dutch-American history, and more could be done to showcase those materials online. More effectively utilizing special collections can increasingly become the basis for new collaborations between professors, students, librarians, and technologists.
"Having hoarded their treasures for centuries," writes Darnton, "libraries will at last be able to share them with the rest of the world."
The holdings of our libraries—like the publications of our faculty members and students—can become a major part of the public face of our institution.
Through the many twists and turns of Darnton's book, one major point emerges: "Libraries were never warehouses of books. They have been and always will be centers of learning. Their central position in the world of learning makes them ideally suited to mediate between the printed and the digital modes of communication."
And as Marilyn Johnson describes them, libraries are becoming "the new village green." Far from being the declining years of these revered institutions, the present offers new opportunities for collaboration and democratization with the library—and librarians—at the center of that experience.
Thomas H. Benton is the pen name of William Pannapacker, an associate professor of English at Hope College, in Holland, Mich.
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