Analyzing a Blog Post

Jeff Atwood, in his article “Because Reading is Fundamental,” immediately presents us a visual element in his blog post to draw our attention to user statistics.  He does this to start the conversation about how much more people talk online rather than “listen” (read.) Commenters often engage one another in immediacy with their opinions and information related to the entry or article to boost their contribution ratings.  But are these the followers we need for our work? Jeff Atwood offers some insight on this issue.

This blog post is likely targeted to an audience of Internet-using adults, ages 18-50 years old.  These people are of average or above average intelligence and are likely educated. They contribute to the online community through blogging, journaling, and/or reviewing relevant topics of interest.

Jeff included two pieces of research in his post.  First, the ARS Banana experiment was conducted to see if people commenting on a posted article caught the instruction to put “banana” in their comments.  The instruction was embedded in the seventh paragraph out of eleven and “banana” was not mentioned until the 93rd comment. This provides a possible look at how often people either skip an article to make immediate comments or do not fully read the article before making a comment.  Then the “Slate Experiment” analysed the scroll length of visitors to Slate articles and found that a statistically significant portion of people only read about half of a given article (with many others not even scrolling down.) These initial experiments indicate that there may be a lot of people who engage online information sites who do not actually read entire articles.  These experiments are incredibly revealing yet there still exists some questions. Are other online readers as non-committal as these readers? Jeff only featured two experiments from two different online information outlets. Maybe these article readers have less time to invest as, say, a New York Times reader does.

Regardless, though, the main point of the blog post is that many readers simply do not “listen” online enough.  Readers tend to spend their time exchanging comments about a particular subject when they barely even read the featured piece in the first place.  Jeff’s solution? Incentivize the reading.

Jeff proposes four main strategies to help bloggers get people to read more.  First of all, he recommends removing any boundaries to reading (i.e. pagination.)  The less a person has to do to continue reading, the more likely they are to continue reading.  Secondly, he recommends that bloggers measure the read time of their visitors. This gives the authors an idea of what kinds of posts are being read and can help focus content (and it also helps the site owners learn who is worthy of their time.)  Next, he emphasizes using “gamification” to reward readers for doing what they do best - reading. Last of all, update your article’s traffic live as it comes in. Make it dynamic instead of a lifeless back and forth debate so people can engage in all aspects of the material.

The research may be limited yet the message is still useful.  There is everything to gain from creating incentives for folks to read more about what they comment on.  This creates a wider more informed audience and the effort of the writer is rewarded in full.

"Because Reading is Fundamental" - Jeff Atwood