Is Obituaries a la Blog HOT or NOT?

Is my Blog HOT or NOT?

Texas stories by the barely employed, just hanging on.

The New York Times:

Senate leaders are expected to delay a final vote on a bill to overhaul the nation's bankruptcy rules until at least September, Congressional officials said today.

The move raised new concern among the bill's supporters that anti-abortion activists will now have weeks to plot strategy to defeat a bill that otherwise enjoys broad bipartisan support and has been the focus of years of lobbying by the credit card industry and the nation's banks. ...

The latest developments have alarmed lobbyists for the financial services industry, ardent supporters of the bill, who have never been so close to victory in their in their long campaign to win Congressional approval for an overhaul of the bankruptcy system — one making it harder for people to escape their debts. The bill would require many people entering bankruptcy court to pay back at least a portion of their credit-card loans and other unsecured debts.

Personal bankruptcy is good for our souls, our character, our freedoms, and our economy. We all need hope. Especially when things go tragically wrong. Bankruptcy's protections promise freedom after enduring pain, redemption after repayment. Without bankruptcy, bad cirumstances or bad judgement can condemn families to lifetimes of poverty and indentured servitude.

Bankruptcy also lets small business leaders to take risks, knowing their families will not suffer forever for a needed business failure.

Rolling back bankruptcy is unAmerican, bad public policy, short sighted, and bad business. No one wants to file for bankruptcy. We don't need to make it harder or worse. Let's preserve this part of our social safety net.

[aka public policy]

Dave's Handsome Radio Blog! says:

10's Links: "When and if I'm ready, I'll move up to Moveable Type, hire Blogatelle, pay for a server, etc., but for now I enjoy this alternative."

I've seen this too often not to say something. I think Radio has a lot more features than Moveable Type. Sometimes people confuse difficulty with feature richness. MT is designed to run n Unix, which means that it can be difficult for average people, because Unix already presents a high barrier. Radio is designed for Mac and Windows users, not developers (although it has deep features when you lift the hood), so it has to be easy to set up and use to work.

I agree with David. But Radio is difficult in its own way.

When fun, cool, and powerful features are buried, awkward, or unreliable, that is a user experience design failure. When a blogger tries to explore and discover features, and can't, that is a UE design failure. When "basic" tasks are not self evident, that is a UE design failure.

Try some of these things:

• Delete a post from three months' ago.
• Set up a project klogging cluster. 
• Set up a blogroll.
• Choose which tools to install.
• Show links to an item's categories, and linkbacks, and Google citations.
• Make my template more accessible.

Now try these things without knowing html.

How is not obvious to naive newbies. In other words: newbie initial mental models don't correspond to the developer's mental models or the software's physical model.

Radio's rough edges remain a key issue, something of a barrier to uptake. Radio has been percolating for more than a year, flushing out hundreds of exciting capabilities, most delivered simply and explosively.

If it was my product (and it's not), my knee-jerk reaction: bring in a usability SWAT team to do their thing. Persona casting and profiling, task analysis, trials, measurement, design feedback, user experience patterns and an experience style guide. 

Double user success on the top 100 tasks:

1. open up new markets,
2. cut supports costs, and
3. makes the overall product more attractive to developers.