Okay, let me confess, I was the woman the Washington Post quoted many moons ago:
One woman jokingly dubbed Nielsen the “Jerry Falwell of Web design” because he holds fundamentalist design views and rigidly rejects stylistic flourishes. Yet even she came to hear him talk.
Well, to be fair, I actually came to hear Bruce Tognazzini. And I was anonymous, because I wouldn’t let the Post attribute my personal opinion to my professional employer. But whatever.
But maybe Nielsen got some things right :).
After my nearly two year hiatus from blogging, I came back this past summer and started up again. Given that 1) I was away for so long and 2) I warned folks I was gonna do as much personal and political as information design (the former focus), I fully expected to see my traffic remain at the far right end of the long tail.
Well, six months later, and I finally got around to reviewing my stats. And was I surprised! I’m averaging somewhere in the vicinity of 3K page views per day.
Okay, not Engadget or Daily Kos, but still. And in looking at the stats, it’s pretty darn clear. The traffic is coming from search. To some of IDblog’s archived pages from 2002 to 2004 … which are still sitting at their original URLs.
Last month, if you queried google + halloween, an old post of mine was the top link! And amazingly, over 500 people clicked on that link (or its variant halloween + google).
Amazing.
And in October 2006, well over three years after they changed their logo, nearly 100 people clicked on a search link to visit my post in April 2003 on UPS’ new logo.
Many, many years ago, Nielsen urged people to avoid linkrot. At the time, I agreed with the premise, but questioned the practicality. Clearly Nielsen had never been through a CMS change for a site with thousands of pages.
Now, even though this is a small scale example, I wonder what my company’s traffic might have been had we heeded Nielsen’s advice and kept our URLs active (even if the content itself had to change).
Hmmm.
Update, 11/19: Nielsen had an interesting Alertbox post on whether it’s a long tail or a drooping tail. Worth a read if you’re considering the move into user-generated content.
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I had a great time doing the family thing for Thanksgiving. We started off with a pre-turkey day dinner at the local Chinese restaurant. I had to order their Pittsburgh roll (at right), which turns out to be a California roll with shrimp and asparagus.
Weight Maven is written by Beth Mazur. Beth believes that obesity is more symptom than cause and that the real problem is our modern culture -- especially diet. Beth writes about ancestral health, health policy, & mindfulness. And cats! 
