Jakob Nielsen's Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes posits 10 potential design flaws in weblogs. Some of it is useful, some of it is useless. Sharon has a thoughtful response to the article.

One point Nielsen makes that I disagree with is the notion that weblogs should be specialized. Nielsen writes:

If you publish on many different topics, you're less likely to attract a loyal audience of high-value users. Busy people might visit a blog to read an entry about a topic that interests them. They're unlikely to return, however, if their target topic appears only sporadically among a massive range of postings on other topics. The only people who read everything are those with too much time on their hands (a low-value demographic).

The more focused your content, the more focused your readers. That, again, makes you more influential within your niche. Specialized sites rule the Web, so aim tightly.

If you have the urge to speak out on, say, both American foreign policy and the business strategy of Internet telephony, establish two blogs. You can always interlink them when appropriate.

While this may not be a bad strategy to use, I disagree that this is the best practice. Look at the history blogosphere, including Mode for Caleb, Early Modern Notes, Archaeoastronomy, Philobiblon among others. What great is that these people not have different interests among each other, they publish about different things on their blogs. Blogging is as much an exercise in establishing a public voice and identity as it is a means of publication. To establish that voice and identity, it's often useful to publish on a variety of things because, I hope, we're not cogs fit into our little niches. There are times to specialize, and times to generalize, but I don't think we should base this on the opinion of one guy. This ultimately should be based on your interests and your audience. I don't want to write about just history, or just 19th-century cultural history, or about new media, or web design. I want to write about all of those things, because all of those things make up who I am, and what I do.

On a different note, it would be nice if Neilsen offered an RSS feed for site updates, because I am not signing up for another email newsletter. It's amusing to me that the guru of web usability uses something as unusable (and, in my opinion, outdated) as email updates.