Blogging and Technology

Recently, Amy Coffin of the We Tree Genealogy Blog wrote an important post about blogging and how easy (or not) bloggers make it to leave comments.

She pondered whether bloggers unintentionally make it more difficult than necessary for their audience to comment on blogs.  She asked other bloggers to answer a series of questions about their practices.  It was clear that many of the bloggers hadn't given much thought to it previously and many changed their settings based on Amy's discussion.

The Mechanics of Reading Blogs

This post really got me thinking about blogging and technology.  First off, I was reading the blog post on my smart phone.  I enjoy reading it that way because it has a really nice interface. It shows me only the blog post itself and cuts out the distracting navigation menu and extraneous stuff on the side of my Google Reader. However, it makes if really difficult to leave comments.  You take the challenge that exists normally on a blog and then double it when using a smart phone.  I just wonder how many comments blog authors lose because of issues like this.

Blogging Technology Needs to Be Better

After realizing that, I started wondering why, with so many millions of bloggers in the world blogging on endless different topics, that software developers don't do more to make blogging better.  It makes me think that the developers aren't bloggers themselves or else they would change a few things.

Wish List

Here's my wish list for a few things that I would change.  I'll only mention a couple things here but the list could go on and on.  These are directed at Blogger.com since that is the program that I use.

1) Make the interface for comments easier to use for readers who are not techies.  What are all those options anyway?  I don't even know what some of them mean.  For someone who is not tech savvy it's downright scary.  If anonymous posts are allowed, feature that clearly and simply at the top and put all the other techy options beneath that.  Stop scaring our readers away!

2) Make "Open Link In New Window" a menu option when adding links.  It's so simple it should be obvious but clearly it's not.  Please stop driving our readers away to other sites or helping them get lost when they can't find their way back.

3) Put more effort into the interface for smart phones.  Make it easy for smart phone users to leave comments.  More and more people are using smart phones.  Reading blogs is a great thing to do when you are sitting in the doctor's office or at the soccer field waiting for a practice to end.  More people would read blogs and comment on them if you focused on this up-and-coming technology.

Give Us An EASY BUTTON!

Blogger developers, please give us an easy button!  The technology is there to make the interfaces easier to use while providing more advanced options at the same time.  Perhaps you need to create some focus groups so you can find out directly what we want.  Ask us how we use the programs.  We'll be happy to tell you.

Bloggers - tell me what's on your wish list!