Media Grunt: Michael Bazeley

I tried to leave a comment on a Fortune blog last week (owned by CNN). I say tried because a) the comment still isn’t posted, and b) I’m left with the impression that it may never be. Why? Here’s the confirmation message I got after I hit the publish button (emphasis mine):

Thank you for your comment. Comments are moderated by CNN and will not appear on this blog until they have been reviewed and deemed appropriate for posting. Also, due to the volume of comments we receive, not all comments will be posted.

Although I’m not a big fan of moderated comments, I recognize they sometimes are a necessary evil. But saying you’re too busy to post the comments that come in? That won’t go very far toward building a community around your blogs. There’s a cost involved in nuturing and maintaining online communities, and blogs are no exception. If you’re not willing to bear that cost, then don’t bother having blogs in the first place.

(Speaking of moderated comments, when I tried to leave a comment on a New York Times blog a couple of weeks ago about the Yahoo layoff situation, I was politely informed by the technology editor that the word “suck” is not allowed. As in “Layoffs suck.” Always interesting to see where media outlets draw the good taste line.)

I second what Ryan says about the new Las Vegas Sun site. Looks nice, easy on the eye. Some smart touches here and there. Nice big art. Interesting that they’re linking out to other news sites off the home page (l’horreur!). But I’m beginning to wonder how many more New York Times-inspired redesigns we’re going to see before some clever designer takes us down a new path.

I’m just sayin’.

On his latest podcast, Jason Calacanis takes Wikipedia to task for not being user-friendly. Basically, Calacanis is saying that the wiki markup language and user interface for Wikipedia is too complicated and geeky and prevents regular people from contributing to the Wikipedia community. Calacanis says that Wikipedia is purposely trying to throttle the number of people who can get involved in the site.

I won’t dive into that debate. Regardless, what Calacanis highlights is continuing need for web site owners to keep it simple if they want people to participate.

That means making the technology dead easy and intutive to use. If there’s much of a learning curve for people coming to your site, you’ve got a problem.

You might be amazed at the things that throw off people. On this video page, I can’t tell you the number of people I’ve seen who try to click the “Click image to play” text. That surprised me at first, because I’ve personally been trained by YouTube to always click on the video still itself (yes, I need to eat my own dogfood and change that). But I see now that people are also accumstomed to clicking on text and making something happen. Yahoo took a beating from users last year when it “upgraded” its TV page to include all sorts of AJAX-y goodness, forgetting that people are partial to what’s easy and familiar.

It’s trite, but if your mom or brother or non-techy neighbor has trouble getting around your site, you need to rethink what you’re doing.