Blogs Not User Friendly?

An interesting study from Catalyst Group Design that puts blog use in perspective for us early adapters and warriors.  Catalyst used a Business Week blog, "Well Spent,"  to answer the question: "how well do people who know a lot about the Internet really understand what they are supposed to do when reading a blog?”  Some of the findings:

• No participant understood the mechanisms associated with RSS/subscribing to a blog – not even the minority familiar with the term “RSS."
• Few participants even recognized that they were on an actual blog – and once they did, had a very different reaction to the information presented.
• A minority of participants understood how to navigate within the blog itself – with most being confused by areas for recent posts, categories, trackbacks and even the comments and archives functions.

I think these are important things to know and keep in mind as more libraries turn to blogs and RSS feeds as a way to market the library, communicate with users, and get out information.  I think blogs are a great way to reach users that libraries tend to lose after story hour ends, and who often don't return to the library until their own children are ready for story hour--young, tech savvy people on the go.  At this point, if we take this survey to heart, it looks like we need to build better, more useable blogs and be mindful of all our users' abilities.

(Link posted to Web4Lib, Aug. 23, 2005)