Free Software Linux

This week in the Web publishing industry has been a little bit of everything: from blogs to online content, from social media to online visitors. We have also learned that 95 of the top 100 newspapers have blogs. As far as the numbers go, it was a great week to be an online publisher.

User comments seem to be a hot topic as of late. Much of it related to why newspapers should either eliminate or enhance them.

In a recent article on Gawker.com, it was strongly suggested that comments should be rid of altogether, citing that "newspapers have more important things to do than worry about comments" and that blogs are "not equipped to regularly break the news."

They don't think that the comments a published story garners adds anything to the content, nor do they help to engage a discussion among readers. Though they do find value in the blogs hosted by reporters, they argue that the comments posted by users do nothing more than expose the ignorance of readers and had they been submitted as letters to the editor, they would never been published in the first place.

Even since the Web descended down from the heavens (through a series of pipes and tubes, of course), we web folks have been obsessed with gathering, analyzing and spouting our wisdoms about metrics. By far the most popular metric these days is the length of time spent looking, reading or otherwise examining the screen in front of us. It is to be accepted and otherwise unquestioned that the longer the time a user spends on a page, the better. So you can imagine the relief of online newspaper publishers when they learned of the results from data collected by Nielsen Online in March 2008.