Hi, it’s Sunday and I’m browsing the internet. I listened to a very inspiring speech by Susie Orbach on Thursday about women and our punishing attitudes toward our bodies, which I found very moving, and have been looking up some of her writing, and browsing various websites dedicated to encouraging more positive attitudes towards our bodies. I was just looking at a website which should have been very interesting, but as the information had all been submitted as blog entries, it was impossible to have a quick browse of the images I was looking for.

I think blogs have two very good purposes: 1. they enable many people to easily publish information to the web without having to learn about website design and html, 2. They suit people entering a continous flow of narrative information, such as personal diaries, work diaries, and so forth.

I don’t, however, think that blogs are well suited for collecting together an assortment of images or information which could be more easily found or browsed on a website laid out with clickable links to different categories of information, i.e. a more “traditional” website layout. It can be very frustrating to go to a site full of interesting information, and find you have to spend hours working back through blog entries to mine out the information.

 I’m a big fan of information design, and making sure that information is gathered and presented in ways which are easy and enjoyable for people to understand and use. It’s important to think about how we are sharing information, and whether the medium we are using is best suited to information seekers.