The newest issue of PC Magazine, October 18, 2005, arrived digitally via Zinio this morning. The first thing I noticed about the cover was the bright black and yellow masthead for “John C. Dvorak on Blogs” (pictured above). What was he saying about blogs now? Turns out he isn’t saying, or rather giving any negative opinion, about them. Instead, he has written a primer for what blogs are and how they work — and with a few nitpicky exceptions, he has done a nice job.

Dvorak’s PC Mag blog primer is complete with numbered pictures showing the components that make up a blog. He uses his own Dvorak Uncensored blog copiously as an example to visually and textually describe 11 different components: headline, “hot” calendar, collateral features, search box, monthly archives, comments, primary link, comments link, blockquote and permalink. Short, but detailed descriptions exist for each of the 11 components. An example description:

The blockquote, which in pubishing parlance, would be called a pull quote or call-out, is an excerpt from the item being blogged. It be a paragraph from a newspaper article, for example. It is usually offset in some way so it appears different from the rest of the text.

Dvorak goes on to describe some “newcomers that haven’t seen blogs before” do not seem to understand that the blockquote is something somebody else said/wrote, not the blogger. In the 2+ years, nearly 2,500 posts and thousands of comments and email correspondences I’ve received related to this blog, not even one Hmm reader has ever questioned who said what in the blockquote.

In fact, of all the bloggers I’ve read, which probably is in the tens of thousands total (haven’t kept track) over the years — and there are hundreds in my RSS reader right now — the only blogger I can remember making this comment is Dvorak. And actually sometimes I have put my own quotes from prior blog entries in blog entries, so shouldn’t that make this phenomenon appear at least once? From this research I’m concluding that Dvorak must get many more newcomers to blogs than the rest of the blogosphere. Any other bloggers ever receive this complaint?

Also, if you look at Dvorak’s blog often times the blockquote is longer than his text commentary, so I can see how some of his readers get confused. I’ve been confused and I’m certainly no newcomer to blogs. John, if/when you read this, the biggest problem with how you handle blockquotes is that the blockquoted content is often more than your commentary text and if you do that frequently enough in the design it overpowers your own commentary and contributes to reader’s confusion. I wish this tip would have been pointed out in the primer, because IMO, that’s the source of the problem.

John says of the blog elements in the closing section: “… to me the most important are the calendar, the archive list and the search box.” Since this blog hasn’t had a calendar for quite some time, I guess 2 out of 3 ain’t bad. A little Meat Loaf for Dvorak.

I would add to this list of important things for a blogger like: the orange xml subscribe icon. Readers need to know where/how to subscribe via RSS and this is the common signpost. Yes, some browsers and aggregators are making that easier that scan the HTML document looking for the RSS feed(s), but having this graphical icon somewhere visible is very important. Unlike the blockquote issue cited, I have heard many bloggers complain about it being hard to find the RSS feed for some blogs. And while there, just having an RSS feed is an important component of a blog. Some blogs don’t have them which I think makes it that much harder to build a readership.

An article on RSS: The Web At Your Fingertips by Larry Magid is sandwiched next to the blog primer, so they chose to keep things separate. There’s no commentary on the other types of blogs like podcasts or vlogs in the primer, but those could be slated for future primers.

Overall, as I said in the beginning this is a nice job, and should net Dvorak a few more hits to his blog. I just hope that those who visit Dvorak’s blog realize that his blog is more like a linkblog or scrapbook blog than what the majority of blogs, from a format perspective anyway, are like. Don’t take my word for it, visit his site and see if you agree/disagree. Some of the things he cuts out from his virtual scrapbook are quite interesting, englightening or humorous. I used to have him blogrolled and subscribed, but the material just got too out of my field of interest.

Dvorak is clearly saving most of his own words for his paid gigs and letting the link/scrapbook flow speak for him. Can’t blame him on that front, that’s his bread and butter, but readers should be forewarned that not everything he experiences as a blogger is necessarily the reality of most bloggers who aren’t saving their words for PC Mag or some book to be named later.

Nice work, John. A third kudo!

• John Dvorak has a change of heart and starts blogging
• Dvorak thinks bloggers are conformists
• The perils of saying you are unsubscribing
• I don’t care if Sponge Bob is gay
• Don’t break the 4 things chain
• Does bad blogger press result in less blog readers?