10 Annoying Aspects Of Tech Blogs
Good old Rarst posted another interesting article today about 10 things that make tech blogs unreadable. He has become quite the little ranter over at his Rarst stronghold but I have to admit that he has a point.
His post got me thinking about aspects of tech blogs that I dislike and I came up with enough stuff to make my own /diggworthy/ list. Interestingly enough that is also number one on my list..
1. Writing For Digg or Other Social Networks
The 10, Top 20, The Best.. Many articles that are written to make the Digg crowd digg the article. They seem to love top lists. And yes, I'm very well aware of the irony that this post is one.. Many people love those posts but I have to say that I avoid them at all costs unless they are special. Consider that before writing about the Top 10 Firefox extensions everyone should use or the Top 50 iPhone applications for iPhone owners.
2. It is English
My English is not perfect and I get bashed regularly in the comments because of mistakes I make. But, there are some blogs out there that are really hard to understand because of the sentence structure and choice of words. If I read something and have to guess what the author means because of the grammar used or the choice of words, then it is game over for that blog. Unless it is really unique.
3. Repetition
Seeing articles about the same news story that originated from one source on dozens of tech blogs is something that makes me click the Delete button in rapid succession. I do not want to read about it if all that you are doing is repeat what the source already wrote. Adding information or opinion is required to keep my fingers from itching.
4. Not Linking To The Source
There are actually two aspects that annoy me here. The first is when a blog is not linking to the source it got the news from. One rule of journalism and scientific writing is to always mention the source. If you do not mention it you land in the trashcan. Yes, many respected online magazines do not like to link to (or only sparsely) other websites.
Some sites on the other hand link directly to a file that they reviewed instead of the developers homepage. That's a no-no.
5. Blogs That Are Not offering Full Feeds
Offering only partial feeds might be a way to get a little bit of traffic from visitors who read the first paragraph of an article in their feed reader. It will on the other hand annoy many tech savvy users who do not have the time to visit hundreds of websites each day to read all the articles that they could not in their feed reader. If an article is interesting enough the readers will come because they might be interested in the comments as well.
6. Advertising Instead Of Reviewing
Some companies like to buy reviews to get backlinks and exposure on the Internet. This would not be a problem if the author of the article would disclose that fact. Sometimes they do not. If it is to obvious the blog will be deleted from the feed reader.
7. Writing Unrelated Articles
Stick with the tech stuff if you run a tech blog. I'm usually not interesting in reading stories about stuff that is not tech related. If it happens occasionally that's fine but if it's a regular thing I'm gone.
8. Internal Linking
Linking internally can be a great way to provide readers with additional information about a certain aspect of an article. Some websites overdo it on the other hand and always link certain keywords to certain pages on their website even if the information is not related at all.
9. Dividing articles on pages
Dividing a top 10 list on ten pages might increase the pageviews tremendously. It will however annoy the hell out of many readers who have to use the print feature to read the full article on one page. It gets complicated if these sites do not offer full feeds or a print option.
10. Filling a Top List To Make It Look Better
People digg top 10 lists but they might not like your fabulous top 17 list. That's why you have decided to fill it with three not so fabulous entries to be able to post a top 20 list. And yes, this is another excellent example of a filler..
Your turn. Got anything to add? Let us know in the comments.
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Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.