So which is the most powerful and influential blog network in the world? Well there are two contenders, the brit owned New York based Gawker media and Weblogs Inc, which for all intents and purposes these days is AOL. And when either of the networks tweak their designs the rest of the blogging world watches very closely. So last week’s revamp of AOL’s flagship blog, Engadget, has already become a big talking point among commercial bloggers.
Since purchasing Engadget and the rest of Weblogs Inc in 2006 AOL has established the gadget site as the number one consumer electronics portal in the world. It has moved a long way from being a typical blog both in terms of the content on the site and its design. Last week’s tweak takes it even further away from what we used to understand as blogging. It underlines how now blogging is as much about long tail content designed to appeal to readers (and whisper it, search engines) over a longer period of time. Highlighting long tail content has become hugely important now for commercial blogs. Sure most still receive a large chunk of their traffic via quick news stories and are fed by RSS, Google News and organic Google search. However long tail content has enabled some websites/online companies to grow massively (Demand Media springs to mind) and it is content that inevitably has longer shelf life and more intrinsic value than most news content.
Let’s see how the new Engadget reflects this
Firstly at the top of the site there is now a floating bar that Engadget calls its hero module – this can be used by the editors to focus on any type of content they feel has a long shelf life. At the moment the bar is full of Christmas buying guides, next month it will be CES etc. This is where Engadget’s premier long tail content will fit.
Underneath the hero module there is now a pictorial section which highlights top stories. This is where the medium tail content sits – stories that are the most important for that week which will have a longer shelf life than most standard news stories. These are housed in five large-ish images and are designed to pick on the day’s premier news. Since Gawker added top story thumbnails to its pages many months ago this has become a standard feature on many blogs. It is highly effective in keeping casual readers on a site. In some ways it is surprising that Engadget has left it so long to add this.
Finally there is what are arguably the redesign’s coolest feature – the hubs. These are like mini categories which focus on key individual products or events. Take a peek at the one for the recently announced Motorola Cliq phone, you get to access to all the stories that mention the phone along with videos, galleries and a timeline that shows which it was announced and when it was most written about. Once again this is all about re-organising content to give it a longer life. It takes the concept of categories and tabs to its logical conclusion.
Strangely Engadget hasn’t followed Gawker, and its gadget blog Gizmodo, to a home page that features just snippets of story and thumbnails Instead Engadget keeps the long established blog format which allows readers to access a lot of stories without ever having to click on. This flies in the face of most current commercial web design which attempts to get readers to continue to click through – the more page impressions the site gets the higher its ad revenue.
Anyhow, the team at Engadget has come up with was really innovative, dynamic and user friendly redesign and it will be interesting to see if other AOL sites gets a similar treatment soon.
