Many companies today are starting blogs to help boost their SEO results. Blogs can be a great tool to introduce new content to the site in an easy to use fashion and without the resources of a web designer or knowledge of html. One great aspect of these blogs is the comments feature that allows users to post comments about your blog post. This is great because the comments are usually about the same topic as the post and can add a lot of good, indexable content to the page other than the main post.

But there is also a darker side of comments, the spam side. Blog comments are an easy way for people to spam links to their site because many people leave the option in WordPress “on” that auto approves comments. I know there have been many times that I had read a comment along the lines of “Great site, keep it up” or “Just surfed in and I love your site”. Sure they seem harmless, but comments allow the user to post his url and name with their comment. So the above two comments were posted by a person named “Buy Viagra Online” and were actually a link to an online pharmacy. This is not good for your site at all. Comments like this can put you into bad link neighborhoods and associate your site with theirs.

The problem is that not all comments are like this. The option to add your url is so other blogs can link back to their blogs. The idea of comments is great and the rewards of building a solid community outweigh the risks of possible spam. But if you are going to allow comments, you need to moderate them all. Check the users post; make sure it is relevant to the topic of your post and not a generic post. Generic posts can be a sign of an automated posting spider trying to spam blogs with open comments. Check the users name and url; you want to allow them to post their url because it is part of blogging but you should always visit the url a user gives to make sure you are ok linking to that site before approving the comment. Comments are one of the best things about blogging but if you are going to enable them make sure you moderate them properly.

I would like to share a few usability resources I have found that can quickly get you on your way to understanding your visitors and employing Best Practices for usability design.

www.useit.com
Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a patent holder and renowned usability guru. You can find invaluable reports as well as all the content from his free AlertBox newsletter.

Don’t Make Me Think (Book)
This book provides an easy to follow, non-technical, yet revealing perspective into what goes on in visitors’ minds when they see your site, from the first impressionable seconds to the interaction with navigation elements minutes later. It details many case studies and guides you with Best Practices for designing for visitors so that you won’t have to teach them to use your site–they’ll know instinctively and will not have to think. It’s a short, but thought-provoking read with suggestions that you will soon want to implement.

www.uxmatters.com
This organization produces an e-zine about usability and design issues. Some of the content is a theoretical, but you can take something away from every article. This site contains a glossary of usability-related terms and abbreviations, conference reviews and access to archived articles. Though they have been around for just two years, there is a lot of useful content.

www.usability.gov
See your tax dollars at work. Uncle Sam has compiled research and guidelines for developing usable web sites. They include topics on everything from planning to designing to testing and refining your website. You can also find newsletters, articles and events related to site usability. They also sell their Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines book, which includes contributions from ‘experts from across government, industry, and academia.’

www.challishodge.com
A blogger with a large archive talks about ‘the user experience, design and strategy’ while applying news of current events in a broad range of topics from art to nanotechnology to Word of Mouth Marketing. In addition to the informative and interesting blog posts, lists of organizations, other blog sites, books and resources can also be found.

www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/index.htm
Poynter Institute runs tests on visitors’ eye movement behavior while reading multimedia and news-related websites. This site, as well as http://eyetrack.poynter.org/, gathers the findings and helps you understand what design decisions can help your site visitors look, and then hopefully click, where you want them to. Though this information is specifically pertaining to news websites, you should be able to apply the findings about images, font size and information recall to your design.

www.webstyleguide.com
Originally published by Yale University, Webstyleguide.com presents a logical, prioritized approach to Best Practices in web design with an emphasis on user-centered design. The guidelines start with a discussion on the design process and design goals, and continue with interface, site and page design, and then delves into visual elements and editorial style.

psychology.wichita.edu/optimalweb/default.htm
This resource’s goal is to assist you in designing a website for user, and does so by combining and presenting knowledge gained from many researchers on human interaction with interfaces. The Software Usability Research Laboratory, the laboratory responsible for this site’s content, includes research from the previously mentioned Poynter University and Neilson. In this resource, along with its sister site, surl.org, much of the text is supported by parenthetical notations so you can find the original publication of a researcher’s findings. Though this site was last updated in March 2003, and some of the suggestions are no longer in use, surl.org’s newsletter is current as of July 2007.

With Microsoft’s unsolicited bid to purchase Yahoo, how would such a merger affect the Internet, especially where search technology is concerned?

By now, everyone – even those who aren’t addicted to the news or the Internet – has heard of Microsoft’s unsolicited bid to purchase Yahoo for a proposed $44.6 billion dollars. We’ve even touched on the subject in an earlier post. As the merger appears to be more and more likely, what exactly does the deal mean for US? How will it affect the way we use the Internet the day after the merger’s done? Or how we use it a month after? Two months after?

Before we start worrying about how we will research a new topic or how our favorite websites will fare, keep in mind that even if Yahoo runs out of options things won’t change overnight. Say that Microsoft finally succeeds in purchasing Yahoo. Given the scope of the buyout, there will be an anti-trust review in the United States. Once that has been completed, there will be another anti-trust review, one that is much lengthier and under the jurisdiction of the European Union. Should the buyout pass those two anti-trust rounds, there is the larger issue of assimilating Yahoo into the larger Microsoft whole. And that will take time.

Assimilation of Yahoo presents cultural and technological problems for Microsoft to overcome. Many of their products and technologies overlap and Microsoft will have to decide which will be combined or which will be eliminated. That in itself is a lengthy process, particularly in terms of combining products and technologies. Additionally, there are cultural concerns. Yahoo has long modeled itself as a fun-loving online company with an open-source technological model. Microsoft’s culture is more corporate and focuses on proprietary software. When the two cultures collide, there will be casualties.

Which leads us back to…how will this affect our Internet? The one we know today?

In the short term, the merger won’t have an impact outside of share prices and continued speculation in the blogosphere. The approval and assimilation processes alone should take years to complete. Add to that the fact that Google has voiced concerns regarding innovation on the Internet and has even taken the step of forming a lobbying campaign to block a Microsoft – Yahoo merger.

So, what of innovation? How different will the Internet be after such a historic union? How much will things really change once all is said and done? Stay tuned. In the next installment, we’ll take a closer look at the advancements made by Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google to see if we can determine how our use of the Internet might change post-merger.