I’ve not watched or followed Oprah Winfrey that much but can’t help feeling sympathy toward her being duped by these bogus non-fiction authors who she has believed in and promoted. Winfrey, like most reasonable people, assume book publishers will vet their non-fiction titles to make sure they are, well, true. Heck, at least mostly true. Winfrey may have the scratch to be able to hire private investigators to check out the veracity of a non-fiction title but should she be forced to do so? I say no.

And how about these pieces of work like Herman Rosenblat, a holocaust survivor turned wolf fiction writer in sheep non-fiction clothing. Oprah deemed Pinocchio-Blat’s story about a girl throwing apples over the concentration wall to help keep him alive leading to a later coincidental blind date the “single greatest love story.” The only part Herman forgot to tell Oprah, her audience, and readers: it was all made up!

Rosenblat’s bogus autobiography is one of one of several memoirs that have been lauded by Winfrey and then later revealed to be frauds — including James Frey’s best-selling "A Million Little Pieces" and Margaret Seltzer’s "Love and Consequences" — consequently calling into question how much weight Winfrey’s future book endorsements will carry.

Writing a book is a lot of work. Figuring out the difference between the truth and a lie isn’t.

If one wants to write fiction then go right out and do it, but don’t be lame and claim some fantastic story as non-fiction. Fiction gives writers all the tools they need to spin tall tales legitimately. 

Some amount – a very small amount - of embellishment is reasonable for non-fiction book because memories aren’t perfect and not all historical events can be recalled in exact detail, but people like the ones blatantly duping Oprah and their readers are damaging the industry as a whole. I don’t respect or consider these writers to be anything more than scam artists. They are going the bathroom where others sleep, eat and drink. Not, not, not cool.

Rosenblat released a statement through his literary agent saying he only wanted to bring people happiness and that his tale was “only a dream.” He along with other writers pulling similar dreamworld confusion acts would bring writers happiness by categorizing their work correctly and honorably.

The AP’s pick  for best website in 2008 is going to Hulu. As I think back to the new websites over 2008, I won’t take exception with that pick. Hulu did just about everything right and I know our family got some real world usage out of the site before getting our TV back. What’s been popular at Hulu so far?

One of the year’s biggest hits was Joss Whedon’s three-part musical "Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog" (on Hulu). "SNL" clips were enormously popular online thanks to Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin impression (also on Hulu). And other sites like FunnyOrDie.com and Strike.TV were pipelines for Hollywood pros to try their hands at Web videos.

Being a Joss Whedon fan with Firefly and Serenity, I had to go over there and check out Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog. Because Hulu allows awesome embeds, I can share with readers Act 1 (13:48) below:

Doogie Howser (Neil Patrick Harris) as Dr. Horrible meets Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion). Corny music but artsy and fun. Superhero musical that’s a “web exclusive” with pro talent and Joss Whedon’s stamp puts it at the top. You can check out Episode 2 and Episode 3 as well.

Hat tip to James Lewin who remembers that a lot of bloggers panned Hulu when it launched. Not this one, a solid Hmm Review Grade for Hulu: B.

In September 2004 I wrote my one and only binary blog post. It was a glorious event that rose my prominence in the blogosphere from just another blogger to heroic status. Ha, who am I kidding, it was a non-event that took 4 years and change to receive the first reply. In binary naturally.  And yep, you guessed it, total binary spam.

I didn’t need do decode the message to see it was spam and neither will you, but I’ll do the decoding anyway.

A lot of ones and zeroes to say: “I’d prefer not having to translate blogs, but thanks for sharing.” Thank you back Comcast spammer 24.60.43.226 from Massachusetts.

Can’t resist breaking from my holiday blogging break to both share one of my favorite humorous pictures from 2004 and comment on the current Facebook breastfeeding drama:

The social networking site has, over the past year, asked some woman users to remove their breastfeeding pictures from the site, saying that they are obscene, and violate the Terms of Use of the site. According to Facebook, the pictures of breasting, which reveals the ‘areola’ - the dark skin around the nipple - violates the site’s policy on “obscene, pornographic or sexually explicit” material.

Anybody who thinks breastfeeding photos are ‘obscene’ is being silly. Strike that, they are being stupid. What’s obscene about babies eating? Sustenance. Staying alive. Now if these women are breastfeeding adults, well, then maybe you have something there that some people might find obscene – but I don’t even think that’s ‘obscene.’

I’ll take this even further: people thinking naked breasts are obscene are being silly too. I never understood the whole flap over Janet Jackson’s nip slip at the Super Bowl. A fine of $930,000 for an accidental shot at her naked breast for a half second?

I’m not some big nudist advocate or anything but think clothes are best for keeping the elements out and showing your personality through style, not for covering up how we came into the world.

But people do get weird about this for some reason and it’s almost never men (why is that?) from the stories I’ve read. Back in 2005 Barbara Walters said women breastfeeding in public made her uncomfortable prompting me to opine that there were far more important things in the world to discuss than breastfeeding. And I couldn’t resist repeating the catchphrase that should be my mantra on the subject: “Let the breasts fly!” I’m happy to update readers that despite being in my 40s, my opinion on breasts hasn’t changed one iota:

I respectfully request that any women who are breastfeeding in my vicinity that they not be uncomfortable if I see their breast. I’m not going to go all spycam or over-hormonal male on the situation but if a breast is brought into broad daylight then the woman in question better not get all uncomfortable about the exposure. If someone is that sensitive about being exposed then go somewhere private to feed your child.

In case you didn’t know – I didn’t (at least don’t remember) – there is a US Right to Breastfeed Act, HR 1848 that became law in 1999 allowing women to breastfeed on federal property. Despite agreeing with women’s right to breastfeed in public, I’m not sure a law was necessary. There are too many laws out there that could be replaced by common sense. Breastfeeding in public should be common sense and not a big deal.

Facebook is fine disallowing breastfeeding pictures

Now back to Facebook. What about websites who don’t want to have pictures of naked breasts up to and including breastfeeding on them? Hey, that’s their call. Sorry lactivist groupies, you can bash them for having a site policy you disagree with but they have a right to have a site policy that prevents these pictures. Calling them obscene goes too far, yes, but that doesn’t change their right to do it.

If Facebook doesn’t want pictures of ducks in hats on their sites, that’s cool. I am all for websites being able to make their own calls on content posted to their websites as long as it’s legal. I’m not aware of any bare breast websites – including breastfeeding sites – ever being taken down for obscenity violations, are you?

I wonder how many Hmm readers know that there has been at least one naked breast picture (gasp!) on MakeYouGoHmm before? Yes, in fact we had a photoshop it post to cover Janet Jackson’s naked breast in 2004. Nobody (sniff, sniff) took the challenge and shared back their twisted creations, but if you want to see that uncensored version of the Janet Jackson nip slip picture above, just follow that link and photoshop until your heart content. Would be nice to see some Fark style mashups there. Just don’t go making truly obscene artwork with that picture.

MakeYouGoHmm naked breast policy

Hey, did you know you can include a picture in comments made here? This has been a secret feature for awhile now that I’ve slipped pictures into comments here and there. Shhh, don’t tell anybody but you can and in context, well, you’re welcome to do so. Just use BB-style code - e.g [img=url] - to include pictures. You’ll have to hotlink though, no upload (just use Flickr or your own web hosting), so make sure that’s a cool. Images will be removed that violate the comment rules (no spam basically), but non-erotic naked breast pictures are just fine. Breast art? No problem. Who decides what is spam, what is erotic, etc? As always, we do.

The MakeYouGoHmm naked breast policy: not for erotica, not for sensationalism, not for pleasure. We will have the absolute opposite policy for our sister site planned for launch in 2009: NakedYouGoHmm.

Really, seriously, why shouldn’t non-erotica naked breasts be posted here? If you have good reasons then list them in the comments but I was able to think of any good ones in 2004.

By this blog censoring breast photos (unless for dramatic purposes) we’d be continuing to fuel a silly problem. So, no, I think the breasts – non-erotica, mind you - will continue to fly at MakeYouGoHmm.com as long as I have anything to do with this website. Readers could change my mind on this, but it will be challenging. Feel free to try below, if you like.

So this is Christmas morning number 40 for moi and before the kids wake up and we do the traditional presents thing, I had one very important present to send.  Oh and you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been taking a holiday blogging break. Lots more to write about when the yuletide smoke disappears. But enough of that, this post is not about me or for me, it’s for a very special friend – actually it’s for a lot of friends but being sent to one specific friend.

I hope it’s not too late for this present to make it to its intended recipient. It’s an email for a friend and fellow associate in our offline business. He may not want his name on the internet so out of respect in this post anywhere his name would appear I’ve replaced with the words ‘my friend’.

A little backstory to bring you up to speed. After 9/11 my friend was so deeply moved by the event that he joined the National Guard. Fast forward seven Christmases later and I’m at home in a warm house with fresh snow on the ground outside – our first white Christmas in many years here – and where is my friend?

Somewhere in Iraq.

Like so many other folks friends, fellow workers, brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers and even some grandparents. The rest of this post is the email I wrote this morning and am sending out.

Dear my friend,

It’s Christmas morning 2008 here in snowy Washington – can you believe it’s snowing here? - and from what I’ve always heard, seen and read thoughtful, kind military folks like yourself really appreciate mail. Please forgive me for not writing you until today, but hey, I’m doing this before the kids are up yet and thought that writing this any sooner wouldn’t be as heartfelt or special. Write me back when you get time and we’ll carry a more active dialog in 2009. I have plenty of things to tell you about the business side of things but will save that for a future email. Passed along your email to Bruce and hopefully he’s written to you already. You’re in our thoughts.

Strange that being 6:36am the kids aren’t up yet but I guess when you are teenagers staying up too late playing videogames Christmas doesn’t mean as much as it once did. I know you are probably thinking of your children, wife and rest of your family a lot today and I’m sure they are thinking back of you even more. What you are doing for this country is among the greatest gifts given to all of us and I want to thank you, my friend, from the bottom of my heart for your selfless service to the United States of America.

After 9/11 I haven’t done anything nearly as important and noble as what you are doing right now. It is my hope that the final third – or fourth if the great unknown doesn’t happen first – of my life is spent giving more back to others. It’s sort of that one great, unfinished chapter of my life and I’m honored and humbled to personally know some special people like yourself showing me the way of how an important part of one’s life should be spent.

Hey, forgive me if this email sounds a little syrupy from a guy to a guy. Guess I get this way this time of year. Anyway, I’m going to end with a story of a ticket I got on the way down to the beach earlier this year. Have shared this with some other friends around the world and received some positive feedback. Feel free to share it with your buddies in the service if you like. It’s long, like nearly 5,000 words long, but in the spirit of sharing with brave men and women serving in the armed service something entertaining to read, I hope you enjoy it over there.

Before getting to the story though, do me a favor and get your butt home soon safe and sound so we can jam on that shiny new bass guitar of yours! And hey take care, mon, and Merry, Merry Christmas to you and all others serving. We all miss you!

[snip – insert blog post titled: How I fought a following too close ticket in Oregon]

Merry Christmas 2008 and happy holidays to all who celebrate. And thank you for taking time out of your busy lives to read Make You Go Hmm.

Download Hmmcast #186 (mp3) Running Time: *49:51

* one song was cut from the end of the streamed live show in this download. From time to time we might be cutting out music that was played during the live show. This way there will be an additional benefit for those attending the show live where we feel things are the most dynamic. Not knocking the podcast world, but there’s something special about live streamed audio.

Last Friday and about 48 Fridays out of the year on average over the last nine years including later today I’ve hosted a streaming live web radio show at 2pm PST / 5pm EST / 10pm GMT. As of show #182 we added live video. Even if there isn’t a post ahead of time when we go live each week, you can still tune in the audio stream using Winamp (CTRL+L), iTunes, etc at: 66.154.0.129:8200

If you’ve never tuned in before maybe today will be the day? If not, subscribe already. Our band tabites have performed live during each show we’ve done since moving it over from the prior website that ran from May 2000 until October 31, 2008. It might be our whole band performing or one or two of the members, something plugged or unplugged or both, but we’re trying to perform something original live each show. If you subscribe to the podcast you’ll get to hear music you can hear no other place, although some of this we are clipping out and publishing on tabites MySpace and official band website.

Broadcast live Friday December 12, 2008 2pm PST / 5pm EST / 10pm GMT
Live callers were welcome - Skype: TDavid / (253) 843-6283

What happened on Hmmcast #186

• Reader benefits on blogs. When good blogs turn bad: too much clutter, too many ads, too much noise.
• “Turn the camera around!” Miscellaneous camera placement drama.
• Talking about traffic tickets received and fighting tickets in court.
• Skype call-in working (see numbers). We talked with SlickRick about his past traffic ticket fetish where he had 10 tickets in an 8 month span.
• Live original music by tabites: “Goodbye To Appleton” (unplugged, acoustic, missing second vocals verse), “Economic Ruin” (version available at tabites.com and our MySpace page with some crybaby wah pedal love)

Paying homage to “Friends” with the title. That show cracks me up.

Ever want or need to see the most recent version of a website? Maybe the DNS has changed and now you are still seeing the old version location cached while all your friends are seeing the new version. How do you flush those stale DNS records from your system?

That’s the command to remember: flushdns

Setting up Adsense for Domains on a few of our domains this week and had the need to flush the DNS on my Windows machine so I could see the domain ads that were showing. Kept hitting the search engine to find sites to remind me of the proper shell commands to use. It’s not like it’s super complicated to remember, but I try not to memorize commands I rarely use. Almost have it memorized now though and to help along the process I decided to make it a blog post here as well. What should these type of blog posts be called? Self-reminders? Whatever, let’s get to the flushing.

Step by step instructions for flushing the DNS cache in Windows

STEP 1. Go to START in the lower left corner and type:

STEP 2. right click on the cmd.exe under the Programs bar and in Windows Vista choose "Run as Administrator"

STEP 3. in the cmd.exe shell window type the following:

STEP 4. Reload the website you want to see the most recent version DNS retrieved. Wash, rinse, repeat as necessary.

A couple months ago I wrote positively about an indie music exploration site called TheSixtyOne over at VTOR which had an MMO-like leveling structure and used the freshly titled Massive Multiplayer Music Discovery as its motto. Considered writing here about it originally but the MMO elements made it more appropriate for the group gaming / virtual worlds / MMO blog. My interest in T61 was maintained for about a month or so and included inviting several friends online into the site too. They seemed to like the site as well. All seemed good. Here’s what it looked like back in September 2008.

Now here it is a few months later:

T61 did something that never ceases making me go hmm on the web: started changing what passionate users of the site liked. Too many websites have chosen this silly path. They have momentum, buzz, and then decide to change things for the worse. Why? It’s one thing to make updates and add features but sites that have unique features should build upon these unique strengths and tear away non-unique weaknesses.

In a word: listen.

And boy has T61 stopped listening. They started removing features that were useful like an artist being able to provide news updates: gone. They also started clamping down on areas to allow and discuss criticism of the site on the site openly. Bizarre.

T61 member arcadia, who has been with the site much longer than myself or any friends invited, summarizes the issues in a post titled "The Death of TheSixtyOne":

A complete site redesign without forums to even report glitches, let alone to express members’ concerns. I have to laugh at the fact that the designers had the nerve to include a section called “zeitgeist” after going to such lengths to ignore the people who tried to make this once magical place their home on this crazy world wide web. Sorry, you can’t post anything but bugs in these forums. Sorry, you can’t post on that person’s wall anymore. Sorry, you can’t post anything on this site but blips… on the walls of the people you already know. Sorry, no more tuneboxes. Sorry.

Word to those building websites for the rest of us out here to like and recommend to our friends: don’t change what we like. We can spend time at any website out there for as little or as long as we like. If we tell you we like feature ABC, then keep them, enhance them if you must, don’t distort and destroy.

Why does this happen on the web? Wish I had the answer, but don’t. It’s frustrating seeing ruined potential.

Despite Sony finally removing the curtain for its ambitious Home project and the Xbox providing a compelling fall update, the Wii is still the holiday 2008 gift to put on Santa’s list. Check out the subject of the Amazon email just received:

Plenty of Xbox 360 and PS3 in stock. Plenty of Blu-ray movies. Guitar Hero, Rock Band and all music games which have been a huge hit for me personally the last month are starting to wane interest thanks to a dirth of adding appealing songs. Where are more great album from the 60s, 70s and 80s? These music games and the struggling music business are missing a huge opportunity by not pushing out a steady stream of albums in videogame format. The console market as of this writing isn’t being soul sucked by the peer to peer sector.

But how about Nintendo? Major props to Mario’s proverbial parents for thumbing their Wiimotes to the hardcore gamer crowd. Even though the Wii gets little play time in our home, yes even with Wii Fit (sigh, we should be using more), it’s still favored over the PS3 but not the Xbox 360.

Our household appears in the minority that craves the Xbox 360 over the Wii:

In fact, Nintendo’s red-hot Wii system outsold the Xbox by almost 3-to-1 in November. Wii shipments in the month totaled 2.04 million, while Xbox shipments came in at 836,000 … PlayStation 3 ranked a distant third, with shipments of just 378,000 units, said NPD.

And it’s not just the Wii that’s a hit, the Nintendo DS has shipped 1.57 million to the more stylish and chic PSP with 421,000. Should any of us feel sorry for Sony? I don’t. They have a beautiful piece of hardware that is collecting dust due to an inexplicably slow launch of new titles. Yeah, they have some great games and as a blu-ray player movies never looked better, but people never were and never are going to buy a game console in large numbers for a proprietary movie format.

Keep on ignoring blog posts like this one, Sony, but the console graveyard is littered with game starved systems.

Sony PS3 Home limp emphasis on gaming

I was excited this week to finally get a peek at the PS3 Home long in beta. I was hoping to see a strong emphasis on gaming. Forget that.

My biggest disappointment with Home is that it launched with exactly the opposite. Why can’t I put buy arcade cabinets from their mall to put in my apartment and invite friends over to play? They could have bought Atari for a pittance and put every Atari game each in an arcade cabinet and offered them for sale in Home. Instead we get as flashy avatars living in this beautiful waterfront view outside that is devoid of any interaction capability whatsoever. You can walk out on the balcony and look in the distance at gorgeous virtual scenery.

Can see but not touch; the PS3 experience personified. Heck,I can boot up Everquest II or Lord of the Rings Online and both see and interact with cool scenery, why can’t I do (enough of) that in Home?

Hey Sony, go check out PhantomEFX Casino MMO. That has user custom spaces that you can get game machines to put in your apartment and invite friends over to play and has been available for a couple years. Not in beta, not some promise maybe in the future, it’s here and in use now.

Now before the Sony apologists start ripping me in the comments for not appreciating Home being beta and free. I get beta and get free, that’s great, thank you Sony, but somebody, anybody tell me why I’m going to bother going into Home at this point rather than launching straight into a game? If I want to hang out with friends online, why not do it outside the PS3 where interactive possibilities abound, thank you very much. There are a bunch of other places online to find fellow PS3 owners that don’t feel nearly as gimmicky and under-utilyzed as Home in its current open beta state.

Frankly I would have rather seen the money spent on Home being used to kick out a lot more fun games.

Home seems destined to be more of the same underappreciated potential squandered, which appears to be the sad state of arguably the best designed game systems ever. Look, I know this is going to seem like Sony bashing, but it’s really PS3 owner frustration that the PS3 could be so much better than it is. I’ve been through this with too many consoles in the past. The Dreamcast was an awesome machine, but review the sobering history if you need a lesson in how software outshines hardware.

The PS3 doesn’t score serious points for being cool and having great hardware, they need to deliver games or rip a card from Nintendo’s marketing brilliance: focus on fun at an affordable price for the whole family. Being the elite gaming system in an economy where every dollar counts isn’t helping Sony, despite offering a free online gaming community compared to the Xbox Live Gold which costs $50 a year.

My friend keeps saying he won’t buy an Xbox 360 because there aren’t enough of the type games he wants to play. This is something Microsoft needs to listen to and try and fill over the next year. He owns a PS3 and Wii and in his post at VTOR shared similar disappointment as me with Home. If Sony can’t get somebody like him excited who is already on board – as you might say about me with the Xbox 360 – then they have a big problem on their hands. Home is supposed to be their stunning, revolutionary dashboard interface. It’s supposed to make people buy a PS3 so they can be a part of the excitement.

Yeah, right.

How can Microsoft and Sony overtake the Wii in 2009?

Is this even possible? I would bet on the economy rebounding first. The real console sales battles were supposed to be fought this season, but I’m moving my projection to holiday season 2009 when the PS3 has a more refined Home experience and will be at full strength. By then the Xbox 360 will have to prove it’s aging gracefully and we’ll find out if the Nintendo Wii continues to do well on the strength of their game library rather than system shortages. Looks like Nintendo may have enough momentum and sales to call it already. If the Wii can be in demand in these troubled times, you have tip the hat. Big time.

As a PS3 owner, I’m worried about the system. It’s starting to feel close to joining the endangered species list. This is the time when I should be talking about how many awesome games I’m looking forward to on the PS3. What am I looking forward to? Well, Home was on that list because I expected it to be more game focused. Yeah, there is a game launcher there and a few very rudimentary games in the bowling alley and elsewhere, but too little, too late.

More games in 2009, Sony please. Get rid of the silly, overpriced Qore and virtual world wannabe fluff and give us more games. Gamers go where the good games are flowing in great supply.

ReadWriteWeb (aka Read Write Web and Read / Write Web) changed from using non-pagination to paginating some (thankfully not all) single blog posts. Strangely, the site owner/operator Richard MacManus is trying to sell this to readers as some kind of benefit. I’ve met Richard in person (at Search Champs v4) and he seemed like a nice enough guy but he’s deluding himself if he honestly believes any of the BS he’s been writing in his comment area that pagination is any kind of benefit for RWW readers. Sure, it’s a benefit to publishers (ahem, him) because they get more page views and thus can boast about their arguably artificially inflated numbers to current and prospective advertisers but it’s not a benefit to me – or you - as a reader.

But pagination [is] useful for long articles, so get used to it
- Richard MacManus October 9, 2008

Get used to it? Why should we have to, Richard? We’ll just unsubscribe if the fumes become too noxious. I know there’s a smiley there, but seriously Richard, why do you think pagination is useful for “long articles”?

Let’s dissect this.

Splitting single posts into multiple pages is a disincentive for visiting and reading your site. Let’s say I’m on a mobile device like an iPhone or Pocket PC viewing the web page (and not using the RSS feed). Mobile devices don’t have as much viewing space so having one page that can be worked in and scrolled is easier than loading a second page and continuing. Readers are being forced to wait for the continuance or conclusion of the post. How is this useful?

When your internet connection is spotty

Or what if I’m reading your blog post while traveling and am losing internet? On long trips this can happen as you come in and out of range. So I can’t load the conclusion of the article until I get internet again because of the pagination. How is this useful?

But wait, devil’s advocate, more text = bigger page = longer page loading, right? You’re saving me time by paginating the blog post?

Splitting up a long article so the post loads ‘faster’

This is weak too. Don’t forget to add the combined time of loading all pages versus loading a single page.

What’s the longest post ever made on ReadWriteWeb? The longest one here to date in over five years is almost 4,800 words. That post page size is 47K. The average length of a post here is 330 words. I checked a post that size for comparison and it was 15K. So there’s what, 32K difference in page size? I realize we aren’t calculating in images or other media used in posts so an image heavy post would be a different discussion, but for a primarily text blog post, there isn’t a huge difference here. Certainly not worth splitting the page and trying to pass this off as useful for readers.

There probably is a ceiling number of words where having a single post paginated starts making a little sense. Is it more than 5,000 words? 10,000? Tell me what you think in the comments area. I know after thousands of posts here I haven’t seen this ceiling even one time. I can’t remember reading a post from others where I thought, hey it would have been a reader benefit to me if this post was broken into pieces.

Conversely, I’ve read many, many articles broken into self-serving pieces and been annoyed that it wasn’t a single page.

Broadband users would see very little difference in page-loading speed between 15K and 47K. For those still on dial-up there would be a delay loading the single page but if you calculate the additional delay of loading the second or subsequent pages required by pagination the speed would likely be negated.

Richard responds to Zemanta CTO on “horrible experience for the readers” comment

Andraz Tori might have some self interests in his dislike in pagination, but Richard’s reply makes no sense (emphasis mine).

Andraz, pagination is perfectly legit way to break up long articles. That’s why we are doing it. I honestly don’t know why people moan about it. It’s one click extra, is that so bad? Why is clicking one more time a "horrible experience"?
- Richard MacManus December 10, 2008

The emphasized confusion Richard seems to be experiencing can be easily explained. People are “moaning” about it because they. Don’t. Like. It.

Richard please explain somewhere why you think pagination of blog posts is a “perfectly legit” way to break up long articles? There is nothing perfect about it. As for legitimate? To whom? Why would you even want to do something the vast majority of readers don’t like. Let me stop you from using the “not many people complain” line. The reality is very few will complain like Andraz, myself and others are doing. The ones that don’t complain and just leave might be the ones to worry even more about.

As for it being one click extra? Come on, it’s more than that. It’s loading/reloading your progressively worse ad-filled page around the content. It’s not just a click to have AJAX populate more content on the page. If that’s all you were doing you might be able to hold to that excuse.

Blog history without pagination

Using the WayBackMachine let’s go back in time to see what ReadWriteWeb looked like when it started and compare to today. It’s interesting to note that from 2003-2007 no pagination within posts was used. Why after five years would Richard’s feelings about pagination within single blog posts changed? I think the pictures tell the story better than words.

2003 - ReadWriteWeb Oct 14, 2003 – no pagination

Amazing how clean a blog starts out, eh? Now see this same post today, some 5+ years later:

2004 - ReadWriteWeb Oct 10, 2004  (side by side with same post 4+ years later) – no pagination

2005 – ReadWriteWeb Oct 12, 2005 (side by side with same post 3+ years later) – no pagination

2006 – ReadWriteWeb Oct 10, 2006 (side by side with same post 2+ years later) – no pagination

2007 – ReadWriteWeb Oct 9, 2007 (side by side with same post 1+ year later)

Don’t take only my word on pagination on single blog posts as a NON reader benefit 

I asked on Twitter if anybody else saw any reader benefit in pagination for blog posts. Here are the responses from MikeG1, addictedtovinyl, pwinn, jason_z, Rocinante and pugofwar:

One of my twitter updates this morning specifically mentioned @rww which is Richard’s Twitter. He hasn’t responded yet but I’ll be happy to update this post with his thoughts, if he doesn’t leave them in the comments and/or trackback area below.

No absolutes, is there ever a good time to break up single blog posts?

I can think of two good times I’d like to see blog posts paginated: when they aren’t single blog posts and for dramatic effect.

For example: a blogger telling me a story in chapters. Each chapter could be broken up into parts and put on separate pages. I could even see breaking up major dramatic moments in the story – for added effect – into multiple posts. Paginating fiction makes sense as a reader benefit. It’s intentional for dramatic effect.

I was tempted to paginate this post for dramatic effect. Really. Like imagine if each bolded heading was a different page? I think that would have been fun in an artistic way. I understand and appreciate style and humor. But back to the title … would this dramatic execution have been a benefit for readers? Probably more like a Hitchcock device.

Can you think of any other time that would be a benefit to you as a reader to have a blog post and/or article paginated?

Jump the shark moment for RWW?

In fairness to Richard and RWW it’s important to end reminding they are not doing pagination on every post (yet). Don’t jump the shark, please.

Since it’s not happening on every post I’m not going to stop following the signal. Consider this a reader correction that a likable publication is doing something reader unfriendly and is misguided if they believe it’s some kind of benefit to readers. If they – or any other blog we follow get too annoying with and obvious with unnecessary pagination – and even one post paginated that doesn’t need not be is eyebrow raising – we should vote with our feet. Should they care? Why not, we’re just readers and there are many other readers to abuse, right? (wrong)

Proponents of single post pagination might say: but wait, just read the RSS feed, no pagination there. When you want to interact as a reader with a blog, you don’t inside the RSS reader. When you want to show a site you generally like some comment love and/or follow the advertisements they offer, you don’t do that from the RSS reader. Most blog posts I like, I check the web version to see if there are embeds or IFRAMEs I might have missed – again, you don’t do that from the RSS reader.

Will end by asking Richard to remember where he came from and that part of the reason RWW gained readers was because it provided good content in a clean, reader-friendly environment. Never forget your roots.