How awful ignorance can be, you can’t imagine but you are lucky enough to see an example. Forrester Research released their review methodology to 16 blogs, where all blogs are nothing but damn failure. Well I didn’t expect anything different since they are more conventional web analyst and live on mainstream media’s. This so called report proves how poor is their judgement and methods in respect of blogging. If you read Ryan Block’s blog you will find his article Forrester takes on top blogs, all blogs fail, which will give you some idea on this. I got the PDF report from his site.

The things Ryan already discussed I won’t go through those for avoiding redundancy. I will point out some discrepancy of Forester’s report.

• Like a Corporate fagot, forester published the research report as PDF, they are not even sure by themselves. Their own damn blog even feature this report.
• Their recommendation is sounds good but already exist in most of high profile blogs. And whoever wrote that report didn’t know in blogosphere high profile blogs are not from journalist or corporate entities. Their own blog (last entry was a month ago) does not posses any of the recommendation they made. I say fix yours before trying to become expert of others.
• In all of their test i see high score are bias. In Value categories professional blogs are lowest and Journalist blogs are highest (Oh my my why is that? smells like mainstream media love). Next category navigation product blogs are highest and professional blogs are midlevel (well in case they don’t know most product blogs are designed and created by professional who are blogging already). Next in presentation categories they gave journalist blog highest score (i didn’t know journalist were designers too!, who actually build the blog for them?).
• In Failure section surprisingly product and journalist blogs are not so much failure, why is that? I thought all over the net we see the growing popularity of blog, even news media likes crowdsourcing then how come mainstream journalist are still rocking (who merely get few thousand readers a day)?
• Navigation: nonexistent categories and ineffective search, that’s what they said. I see 98% blog have categories search by archive, by keywords even by authors or tag based. In their own blog i didn’t see anything different, alternatively in their blog i see a huge list of unrelated links like Women blogger from “blogher.com”. What that got to do with industry research There is a Link title named “Event calendar”, which is empty. Fix your navigation Forrester.
• There data/stats are unbelievable. look what they said in that report–

regular blog readership is low — slightly more than 40% of US online consumers say they’ve read a blog at least once, but only 7% of the online population reads blogs more than once week

I think they never heard of MySpace the second busiest site in the world is all about blogging.

There are so many more discrepancies through out the report. This report is nothing but a joke. I agree the women in charge have good educational qualification, but she really don’t have any slightest idea what social networking means. Even a 15 year old punk strolling around MySpace have better knowledge of blog then this so called report writer(s). I wonder if they got paid for making that report. You can download the report from Ryan’s blog, i got it from there.

[tags]Forrester, Blog award, blog design, usability, Gizmodo, boing boing [/tags]