This week there has been quite a large amount of articles regarding the web community and what kind of things people write about. This article at Smashing Magazine to mention one of them. Especially lists or ”listicles” are being attacked and a lot of people seem to agree that most of them are of poor quality.

All of this have made me think about the kind of articles I enjoy reading and the kind that I, maybe not hate, but consider to be rubbish.

The Glossy Sexy Kind of Stuff

I really have a problem with any article that contains the words ”sexy slider”, ”awesome glossy buttons”, ”1200 things everyone must know…” or similar. Why? Cause most of the time it’s just junk. Like fast food web articles. They quite often contains a bunch of links or code that probably are copied from some guy who copied it from someone else who… yea, you get my point. They are like that awful kind of pop music simply written to become popular. Most likely these articles never deal with the question of why. That’s too deep for them.

Genuine Food for Thought

The articles I really do like and enjoy reading are of two kinds. First the well written ones where you could really feel how the author has put in thought, sometimes not only into the text but even the images and the design surrounding the article are beautifully done. These are articles that I usually save for later when I can curl up on the couch with a nice cup of japaneese tea and just enjoy reading.

Short But Sweet

Then we have the other kind. Short hands-on tips from people who really know their craft. Why do I say short? Cause a lot of times good things disappear in a clutter of images and unnecessary text that are too small to read without a magnifying glass or the readability bookmarklet activated.
I have found that the tips I really enjoy are short tips on one specific thing. I need to know what it is, why it should be done and finally how to do it. A couple of hundred words should be enough to do the trick.

Reading Tweets is Not Enough

I know that we live in a time right now where it seems like none of us have the real time to sit down and really read. On the other hand it’s impossible to get a full understanding by reading tweets and skim through bigger pieces of text. So no, Twitter is not enough. If you really want to be good at something you need to put in time and effort. Of course you cannot read it all. You need to learn how to find the chocolate chips in the internet cake.

I think quality is not about the amount of text or links, the fancy words and the glossy images. It’s about getting under the skin of us readers and hit that spot that makes us go “Wow, I think I just had a revelation”. You know what I mean? Or is quality something completely different for you?

/Ida