Edit: Can’t find the link. Owh well! Thanks for the link, and the update. :)

I particularly enjoyed what you said about language being inhibited by the nature of the web – I haven’t given much thought to Indians writing on the Internet and how they differ from the ‘clinical’ English we get everywhere. But thinking about it made me realize how true that statement was: some Indian blogs I came across used language that felt … weird. Beautiful, but weird. They translated poems quite literally from their mother tongue, and some of the beauty was lost, but certainly not the effect.

The useit.com is controversial. Some designers exhalt it, others damn it. Either way it’s going to stay: Jakob Nielson is very happy with how it looks and reads.

Ed, your point about defining what bloggers are shouldn’t be that much of an issue. Spending time reading blogs and absorbing influences will slowly shape their blogging style, so the danger of being ‘what is applauded’ may be present, but it will/should dissapear within the person over time.

Readers can tell when we’re not writing from the heart.

PS: Is ITF a term of your own invention? It describes the situation pretty well!

I’ve often spoken about this to my acquaintances – with regards to taking into consideration the information processing-friendly factor, IPF.

This does not refer to styles of writing and content as to make these IPF these days require that one throw out half the intellectual content, poetical forms, relatively novel concepts and paradigms, and make sentences bart-friendly. On top of this, it requires a non-westerner to discard her/is culturally nourished ways of communicating and ‘think and speak like the white man because you are communicating in his tongue. Thus, relatively unusual ways of communicating, by frequent recourse to analogies, poetical forms, rhymes, proverbs – that are quite the norm amongst, say, the indians in south india, are discarded for the dispassionate and clinical style of the west – a style of communication that stifles thought in other forms.

What i refer to by IPF is, amongst others, spacing between paragraphs and lines, emboldening the first few words of each paragraph to catch the attention of the reader whose finger might be hovering irresolutely over the ‘click-away’ button, summarising the article with a quote at the top to give the reader a formula with which s/he might make sense of the content, etc, etc.

The useit.com site is interesting. It is a site that is for the true ‘information-processor’ as opposed to the ‘entertainment-imbiber’. Sites geared for the former assumes the intelligence of the reader, whilst sites structured for the latter attempts to circumvent the attention-span-deficit, amongst other deficits, suffered by those reared within the auspices of ‘click-culture’.

Finally, efforts need to be made to define the term, ‘blogger’. A ‘blogger’ is as descriptive as ‘a person who uses a pen’, or, ‘is able to communicate’. If this is not done, then the masses of impressionable minds that are joining in the blogging world are going to take their ideal selves as that which is most lauded amongst bloggers, or that which is the ‘trend’. Thus, their tendency to be other than that which is applauded is undermined.

Interesting article. Thank you.

ed