On 02.Jun.2006, at 11:35, blogdiva@culturekitchen.com wrote:
As I have told many a software / net artist : If a child cannot use the artwork consider the UI a failure. In the case of Drupal, you dont have to make it easy for a 6 year old to install and maintain, but you may want to think more along the lines of ... and yeah, I can be sexist about this ... cheerleaders in tight abercrombie and fitch wet tshirts wanting to make their own "suicide girls" site.
This, I insist, is the trend that's going to explode in the next 18 months.
I hit the send button too soon. One more point I want to make about demographics and usability. 57% of bloggers are women. Women tend to make communities with their blogs; which is why a big chunk of these women bloggers used to be found in LiveJournal. The two fastest growing services at the moment are MySpace and Facebook. In my chunk of the blogosphere (I am on the advisory board of BlogHer), most women are running multiple sites : a blog, a myspace, a livejournal and if they are young enough a facebook. As someone following the growing audiences of some of these women (I am writing an article about this for a major US magazine), i can see that it's becoming increasingly difficult for these power users to manage all their blogs --because the more connected they are elsewhere, the more traffic and demands of community interactivity the are getting from their commenters. In other words, MySpace and Facebook are transforming the blogosphere. People dont want to be just commenters. They want to be part of a community. I could go on and on. I'll post on my site and y'all can follow up there. Cheers, liza