Wednesday, January 24, 2007

How Do Users Find the Times Blogs?

I read with great interest David Hiller’s letter regarding the changes occurring at the newspapers online edition, its about time, is all I can say about the much needed changes about to take place.

The Times blogs were brought to my attention by Matt Welch, and I’m elated I was able to see the blogs before the changes were made. And as a direct result of the Times blogs, I made a $250 purchase from one of the advertisers, that’s really the bottom-line, generating sales though the blogs.

I’m far from an expert when it comes to navigating the Internet, but when I cannot locate the Bottleneck Blog, written by Steve Lopez, how many others are missing this blog as well. The only blog listed on the Times homepage is Opinion LA, and I’m sure most if not all the Times blogs are listed here.

One indicator of the popularity of a blog post are the trackbacks to other blogs, yet the blog post “Have you finally had it?” has no trackbacks whatsoever. But there are 525 comments, this tells me this was a very popular subject to the readers, and some online users have been able to locate Steve’s blog through all the information overkill on the homepage.

I have linked as many Los Angeles Times Blogs as I could locate, and I’m certain some have been missed. If you know of any Times Blogs missing from here, drop me a line and I will add it to the LA Times Blog links.

Let’s hope the online version of the Los Angeles Times becomes much more user friendly in the near future.

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