Freedom of the Press is Limited to Those Who Own One
Jakob Nielsen is a noted expert on the subject of internet usability, a subject commonly known as “user-friendliness”. Nielsen’s October 17th article, Weblog Usability, has been linked to and discussed all over the place.
I’ll go ahead and jump on that bandwagon, by taking issue with something in that article. The overall premise of the article is a good one, that web logs should be informative, easy to navigate, and that they should contain certain key elements: author biographies, main ideas, etc. Here is the part that bugs me: Issue Number 10.
10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service
Having a weblog address ending in blogspot.com, typepad.com, etc. will soon be the equivalent of having an @aol.com email address or a Geocities website: the mark of a naïve beginner who shouldn’t be taken too seriously.
Aside from the fact that this isn’t really a “usability issue”, it bothers me that this is true, and it is true. I’ll admit to personally looking down upon those MySpace blogs, because they’re so ugly, unfriendly, and lacking features, but is that fair? Is it appropriate to prejudice something published online, because its author chose to use a free service to publish it? Is it fair to presuppose that the blogs provided by blogger, or friendster, etc. are somehow lacking in the level of technological sophistication compared to other blog software. They are not any more or less sophisticated. Most of the free internet publishing systems out there are actually quite good. What’s especially good about them is that they are generally usable even if you are an AOL user, naïve when it comes to computers. They assume a certain level of inability with or disregard for maintaining those “usability issues”, on the part of their users, and so they take care of those things, only providing templates that work for example. Yes, the free services are limited, and many of them contain advertising, but I don’t see that as a valid reason to judge their content to be any less deserving of attention. You have to read more than the address bar to make a decision like that.
A.J. Liebling once said that “freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.” Why shouldn’t everyone be able to have, and to use, a free press, free-of-charge?