State your full name

Jakob Nielsen, web usability guru, focused his Top Ten Design Mistakes on weblogs for this year.

I hate that he's right in his corollary to Mistake 4:

A related mistake in this category is to use insider shorthand, such as using first names when you reference other writers or weblogs. Unless you're writing only for your friends, don't alienate new visitors by appearing to be part of a closed clique. The Web is not high school.

I like that casual, breezy aspect of the librarian's corner of the blogosphere. But I am becoming aware that it kills the readability of my posts. Considering that I have potential employers and my brother (hi Dale!) reading my blog, I really need to avoid entries like yesterday's where I didn't use the full name of Meredith Farkas or link to the top level of her blog, Information Wants to Be Free.

Another reason to use full names and titles of blogs is that many bloggers have ego feeds in Technorati, Google Blog Search, and other places. Some of these ego feeds are set up to pick up links to the site, but many rely on full names of people and blogs. So if I want that high school feel of people knowing that I'm talking about them, I need to make it as easy as possible for their ego feeds to pick it up.

I guess I need to find a photo I like of myself...(number 2 on Nielsen's list).

I got a kick out of Blogger's response to the list, particularly number 6 that says to use categories as an additional organization scheme. Blogger doesn't have categories, so they suggested that we Vote for feature requests, where "categories" is the top item. I did that. Lack of categories is what will push me to another blogging software solution in the next few months.     #

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