Nick Bradbury on blog post titles:
As people subscribe to more feeds, the more they stop reading every unread item and instead just skim the titles looking for something that interests them. If you use boring titles for your posts, skimmers like myself are likely to skip right over them.
Ever since I did my media fast experiment, my Google Reader unread count has floated somewhere between 875 and >1000. Since I switched to more selective reading, I use List View instead of Expanded View and post titles more than anything push me to actually read an item. Another thing to be careful about - titles that are too news-y. If your post title reads, "XYZ Corp Announces ABC", then you need to go back to the writing board, so to speak. For one, a title like that often sums up enough of the entire post to suffice. In addition, a post title like that screams "Press Release regurgitation" and suggests that more of the same basic information that I probably read before. In this case, even "Thoughts on XYZ's ABC Announcement" is slightly better because it signals that you put more thought into the post than simply picking original-sounding synonyms to cover up the fact that not much, if anything, was added.
Technorati Tags: blogs, blogging, titles, writing, traffic, attention
Some from last week:
A map of soda/pop/coke popularity by county. Some interesting little pockets of "soda" in the mid-West and I didn't know most of Florida preferred Coke, but with only 120k respondents across the U.S., maybe it's not too accurate.
A McDonald's billboard features a sundial. Too bad it's McDonald's because the ad is pretty cool. Total calories consumed before 1pm according to the ad: over 3000.
Pacman for Excel. For some reason I have had this page open for a few days and have yet to download it. Weird.
The Wiimote retail box unveiled. Nintendo's Apple-like design approach has extended to the Wiimote box, which looks a lot like the new iPod nano enclosure.
Interesting coincidences while watching the 6 Star Wars movies simultaneously. Some are a bit of stretch and I doubt that any of them were planned.
Technorati Tags: soda, pop, coke, culture, dialect, McDonald's, billboard, sundial, Pacman, Excel, VBA, Nintendo, Wii, Wiimote, Apple, iPod nano, Star Wars, movies
Orangoo is a nifty little AJAX-enabled online spell checker I found last night. It appeared on Digg today so I figured it is worth a mention. As usual, give me an API so I can integrate it into other web apps.
Technorati Tags: spell check, language, AJAX, Orangoo, spelling, international, API
Marc Dominus over at The Universe of Discourse has done some research into the history of the equal sign. Part of the reason a pair of parallel lines was chosen was "because no 2 things can be more equal." The entry also mentions the origin of a two other diacritical marks, ˜ (tilde) and ¨ (umlaut), which evolved from the letters "n" and "e", respectively. Very fascinating stuff.
I only stumbled across this entry a few minutes ago, but the rest of his blog looks equally interesting as well.
Technorati Tags: math, equals, letters, history, etymology, characters, Universe of Discourse
