From Clive Thompson:
When I interviewed Cory Doctorow — cofounder of Boing Boing — for my recent New York magazine feature on blogging, he pointed out an interesting aspect of Boing Boing’s success: Simple, straightforward headlines. Many bloggers tend to write clever, wry, allusive heads to their blog posts. This is a big mistake, Cory said, because so many people use RSS readers to scan their favorite blogs. Many RSS readers are configured to display the headline to each blog posting and a bit of text; in some cases, they display only the headline, Cory noted. And many people have dozens of dozens of blogs in their RSS readers, which means they’re scanning hundreds or even thousands of headlines a day — and thus scanning them at lightning pace. If you write abstruse, punning headlines where the meaning isn’t immediately clear, the reader will never click on your entry. Boing Boing, in contrast, always writes simple, just-the-facts headlines — and this, Cory says, is one secret to the blog’s success. Get that? The human readers of blogs are beginning to behave like bots, too: Quickly scanning for semantic meaning and ignoring everything else. |
So much for my clever-headline-writing ways. Out with the puns! Utilitarian headers ho!
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