Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen seems to be on the defensive this week. It looks like someone asked him why he doesn’t have a blog just one time too many, and his latest weekly article is about how a real expert should set themselves apart from the madding crowds of the blogosphere and focus on quality content.
This is an approach that’s done him well over the years, and seen him crowned King of all things web 1.0. I’m not so convinced he’s on the money with this though, or that anyone setting out to be an ‘expert’ like him would be best served following his lead.
I stopped actually reading his Alertbox column about a year ago, when I noticed his feature articles were sometimes just repeating themselves from previous years. I just never got around to unsubscribing from it.
Nielsen believes that your expert quality comes out best in serious articles. Even the best expert writes bad blog posts from time to time, so effort put into this (and all the trackback-slapping to build buzz) is wasted and gets you lost in the morass of mediocrity out there. I think this is all very well & good if you were in from the beginning, and have a mailing list the size of Nielsen’s one, but for new would-be experts, it maps out a very slow path to recognition, if you actively choose not to use the networking capabilities of Web2.0 to engage with your peers/fans.
Another expert who I do read a lot more now is the Chad-like guru of permission marketing, Seth Godin. He takes the opposite track to Nielsen and posts whatever he’s pondered on the drive to work (in his Prius, natch) or happened to see on the back of a milk carton. The idea is that he’s still the expert, but he’s having a conversation to develop new thinking. And a conversation gets you talked about.
His scatter-gun epistles are sometimes wrong (often getting him more links than the less controversil ones), so then he posts equally speedy updates, keeping the conversation going. Overall, I disagree with him more than often with Nielsen, but I read him much more as his little insights have more variety and are fun as 30 second thought provokers.
But who’s right? Well, I convinced a former boss to part with £150 for a conference place to see Nielsen’s ’98 tour, but have only dipped far enough into my pocket to buy one of Godin’s books (1999’s Permission Marketing) – I can’t afford his live appearances! So on the balance sheet, Nielsen is winning.
The time honoured method of a FIGHT! is inconclusive, but the lines never lie – Nielsen is slumping on the links, and Godin is growing, which I think is a good pointer. I’m aware that I’m hardly the target market (£250k consultancies), and also aware that Godin’s armies of trackbackers are also probably not going to do more than download the ebooks he’s generous enough to give away (a way of doing Nielsen’s serious articles even more seriously, but very rarely), but he does seem to be propelling himself into überexpertness faster than Nielsen did.