Mena Trott on Blog Design

Six Apart’s Mena Trott was recently interviewed by Business Week online. Six Apart is working on Project Comet (beta-launching soon) for the “new generation of blogs”.

Mena believes the next big issues in blog design are:

Select and filtered readership - different people want different views of the blog, something I touched on recently. “A big issue right now is how to take that idea in account when designing blogs”.
Keeping blogs uncluttered when more and more assets are added to the blog. (Amen!)
Discovering which template designs appeals to the largest number of people. Designing simple and bare-bones templates where you can focus on content and context.

[...] Mena Trott recently said that one of the biggest challenges for blog design is keeping them uncluttered. I’ve been thinking about this for some time and have been reflecting on 37 Signal’s post entitled “It just doesn’t matter”. In the post Jason writes in response to questions about Campfire: “Why time stamps every 5 minutes? Why not time stamp every chat line?” Answer: It just doesn’t matter. How often do you need to track a conversation by the second or even the minute? Certainly not 95% of the time. 5 minute stamps are sufficient because anything more specific just doesn’t matter. [...]

— My blog timestamps theory: removing the clutter — cre8d design blog, March 2, 2006