This talk at the Breaking Development conference by @adactio is my favorite thing I’ve seen today. It’s not just a great mobile talk – it’s a great design talk. Ooh, and there I go treating the two as different things again!
Jeremy Keith – There Is No Mobile Web – BD Conf, Sept 2011 from Breaking Development on Vimeo.
Editorial note: I first posted this referencing ReadWriteWeb instead of TheNextWeb. My bad. I’ve noted the change below using a strikethrough and replace. MP 20111130
Bloggers are a key audience for digital content creators whose needs and priorities usually go unconsidered by product teams. Bloggers on a beat covered by a media organizations – whether its national politics or local high school football – are certain to be among your most savvy, committed and loyal readers, and their blogs can provide valuable new unique users to your content if they find it link worthy.
To build audience, bloggers excerpt, link and comment on content from a broad range of sources on the topics of interest to their readers. Their incentive is to link to the best content they can every time, and the content experiences they link to are extensions of their site’s ux. When choosing which sources to reference, their first priority is to the quality of the content, but it isn’t the only thing they consider.
John Gruber today posted a follow up to a post he made wherein he linked to ReadWriteWebTheNextWeb. Gruber’s excellent blog, Daring Fireball, has a huge, committed following and a reputation for sending a lot of traffic to the sites he links to quickly. His follow up was prompted by a tweet from a reader about the page weight of the ReadWriteWebTheNextWeb article (3+ MB!) he had posted to, and explained that he considered not posting the link despite the quality of the article he was posting to because he doesn’t like the site. With this page weight information brought to his attention, he seems even less likely to do so in the future, though he doesn’t say as much in his post.
In the new media landscape, content creators cannot ignore the basic principles of good web design, which include limiting page weights and load times (even today in the era of broadband). This seems like an obvious statement, even though, in this case, a web only publication about digital products doesn’t seem to be aware of it, but what should be really interesting about this incident to content creators is that the experiences and perceptions of the specific bloggers who blog about the issues your organization covers should be inputs to the design process.