Scoble & Headlines, Me & Images

Last night at our local .NET User Group meeting I was catching up on my RSS feeds as Eric Maino was doing his nUnit presentation (no offense to Eric but this was stuff I already knew). I stumbled across Scoble's post about writing descriptive headlines to help get your posts read. I totally agree. I've been so busy that I had 500+ items in RSS Bandit to read. Obviously I couldn't read them all so the headline of the post was a key factor in whether I read it or not.

But another thing that bugged me about some posts is the amount of graphics included. I was working offline with no internet access. I realize that a picture is worth a thousand words, but some posts were simply copy/paste from an HTML page -- which included all of the IMG tags. Sure, it made your post look "real pretty" for most people but those of us doing offline reading were stuck with a bunch of red-x boxes.

I'm not saying images have no place in blog posts, I just think they shouldn't be overused and consideration should be give to those who may be "offline".

NOTE: Updated 9/17 to include the link to Scoble's original post. Sorry.

2 Comments

  • It would be nice if aggregators had an option to cache images locally for offline viewing. Most people wouldn't use it, but it would be nice for offline reading.



    The aggregator could do a regex match on img tags, pull the image local, and rewrite the img tag to reference the local copy.

  • I absolutely agree. The trick to being able to read as many different blogs as we all do is triaging the posts to a degree by scanning headlines. And I agree that images in blogs can be annoying if you are offline. I'm posting more on that subject on my blog.

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