Attention all blogging-related companies. You probably think you're really good at enabling worldwide communication and are pretty pleased with yourselves because there are 47 million blogs out there and everyone's talking about the blogosphere. Well listen up! Until someone shows me otherwise, I'm saying you all suck. Your communication with potential users is staggeringly bad and you better wise up fast or someone will take this business.
My post requesting technical help and guidance has generated many responses (for which I'm very grateful), but it has also highlighted that the industry is stuck in geekworld. I'm sorry, but your new customers aren't geeks.
Is it beyond your intelligence to write your "help" pages so that they explain step by step how I can transfer the html code to my blog, or show an illustration of how your feature would appear on my blog rather than just telling me they're a whizzo good thing, or clarify the technical terms that are meaningless to the vast majority of people. It's not a big fix. Just a few lines here and there that reach out to the non-geek majority would make such a difference.
Indeed, I note (thanks Ann Michael) that Six Apart are recognising that fact by developing what seems to be an idiot-proof blogging platform. But until that arrives, I don't think it's too much to ask for some consideration for the mass of us who lie somewhere between geekdom and technophobia.
I may not know all the intricacies of blog technology even though I've been using computers for twenty years but I do know a little bit about business. I'm not dumb, but today you did a really good job of making me feel dumb and I know that making your potential users feel dumb is really not good for business.
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