Jakob Neilsen has a new Top Ten list. Now, what do we think of his recommendations?

1. No Author Biographies
I have to agree with this one. People want to know who you are. If you’re an anonymous blogger, give some background info that explains your reason for blogging and why you’re anonymous.

2. No Author Photo
Guilty. I know it seems arrogant, but again, people want to know what you look like. Someday I’ll get around to posting one in the author bio section. It would probably be better to put it on the front page, but I’m not going to go there. I did on Cognitive Daily, though. Call me a hypocrite.

3. Nondescript Posting Titles
For the most part, I agree with this one as well, but sometimes a vague title, provided it offers a bit of mystery, can help draw a reader in.
Brad DeLong is the master of clear headlines
But Scott Esposito’s cryptic slugs make me want more

4. Links Don’t Say Where They Go
Here Neilsen suggests that readers are too stupid to hover over a link and look in the status bar to see where it leads, but they’re smart enough to hover over a link and wait to see if a mysterious “link title” feature that no one ever uses might pop up. I do agree, to a certain extent, that cryptic links can be annoying, but used with discretion, they can be a great source for humor.

5. Classic Hits are Buried
This is a great tip: put links to your best posts right on your home page. But who has the time?

6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation
Here Neilsen makes a plea for categories. Yes, categories can be useful, but a big problem with them is that you never know when you make a post on a new topic if that’s going to be something you return to over and over again, or if this will be your last post on that topic.

The best approach is probably to constantly revisit categories and re-categorize all your old posts. I’ll get to that one right after I finish organizing my sock drawer.

7. Irregular Publishing Frequency
Yes, right. A regular publishing schedule is a good thing. What I’d suggest, in addition to Neilsen’s points, is to not be afraid to make a short post.

8. Mixing Topics
He’s probably right, here. Single-topic blogs are much more likely to be successful than multi-topic blogs. Cognitive Daily regularly gets five times the readership of Word Munger. But if you don’t care how many readers you get, feel free to wax on about GMail one day and Hurricane Katrina the next. I don’t know anyone who’s done that, though.

9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss
Yes. Don’t do this, unless you are a member of the leisure class.

10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service
Meh. I haven’t seen any stigma attached to this. If anything, I find people who’ve registered their own name as their domain a little obnoxious. Not that I know anyone who’s done that.

A recent commenter, Michelle, runs a great blog called New York Brain Terrain. I wish I lived in New York so I could use her excellent advice more often. If you do, you should check it out.

Nice article in which several experts rate Wikipedia entries in their fields of expertise. Now I want to see the same people rate the corresponding Encyclopedia Brittanica entries.

North Mecklenburg high school, the nearest high school to my house, was shut down yesterday because some kids got in a fight. This is the kind of thing that drives parents to private schools. Now, my kids are in a private school, and one thing that creeped me out a bit when we were visiting the school was the emphasis on how “safe” the school is — the clear implication being that your kids won’t be safe in the public schools. Safety was the least of our concerns when we chose our kids’ school: we were much more concerned about student-teacher ratios, curriculum, and opportunities for involvement in the arts.

But for many parents, “safety” is what it’s all about. Safety from what? Kids are going to get in fights. Generally they’re not going to kill each other, but I doubt any school can keep kids from getting into fights, and most fights don’t result in serious injury — the fights at North Meck yesterday certainly didn’t. Arguably, it’s more dangerous to give your kid the keys to the car than it is to send her to school.

What bugs me about the “safety” issues at public schools isn’t so much what the kids are doing, but what the parents are doing. Yesterday at North Meck, hundreds of kids called their parents on cell phones (which they weren’t supposed to have at school) and asked them to come pick them up. Hundreds of parents showed up at the school, which was in lockdown, and banged on the doors, demanding to see their kids. The administration was overwhelmed — not by the kids, but by their parents. If any parent showed up at school that day, it shouldn’t have been to take the kid home, but to take her cell phone home.

I went to a public high school, and there were fights all the time. Nobody ever called their parents to be taken home, and if they had, the parents would have told them to stay at school. The fights were generally between thugs or jocks and didn’t involve the kids who were there to learn, so life went on. I doubt things are much different at North Meck today — what’s changed is the parents.

I suspect many of those parents will remove their kids from North Meck permanently and enroll them in “safe” private schools. I just hope not too many of them will show up at my kids’ school. We don’t want 'em.