Ben Shoemate's Notebook

Steven Snell via Smashing Magazine shared by 5 people

By Steven Snell

When designing a custom theme or deciding on an already-existing theme, bloggers have a lot of factors to consider and there is no shortage of options, particularly for WordPress users. A growing number of blogs are moving away from traditional blog layouts in favor of magazine-style themes; however, the layout and presentation of content has a major impact on visitors and there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

Key Differences

Magazine themes have a few characteristics that distinguish them from traditional blog themes.

1. Magazine themes only use excerpts or headlines on the front page, while standard blogs will use either full posts or excerpts.
2. A magazine theme functions more as a portal to content on the rest of the site. The magazine theme will give visitors a glimpse at what is available and it will direct them to go in whatever direction they like.
3. Magazine themes make more effort to organize the content of the blog and present what is most important, whereas traditional blog layouts will order front page content based on what is most recent.

A good visual guide for the distinction between a traditional theme and a magazine theme is the Gridline series. The first image below is the front page of Gridline Lite, a tradition blog theme. The second image is the front page of Gridline Magazine.

Gridline Lite uses an excerpt for the most recent post and smaller excerpts for other posts below that.

Gridline Magazine gets rid of the traditional blog sidebar and uses that space for more post excerpts and thumbnails. At the bottom there is also space for the most recent post in five additional categories.

Why Are More Blogs Moving to Magazine Themes?

While magazine-style themes are not new, their popularity has exploded in the past year or two. New themes are consistently being released (premium and free) for WordPress users. There are a few significant reasons for this trend.

1. A need to make more content easily available and to improve usability.
   A growing number of blogs are churning out post after post. With an increasing amount of content comes a need for better organization and presentation of that information. Traditional blog themes can make this very difficult while magazines themes will make it a bit easier.
2. The blending of blogs and websites.
   A few years ago most blogs were little more than personal journals. Now as blogging platforms like WordPress have become full-fledged CMS options, the line between a blog and a website is a bit more blurred. Websites that would not have used a blogging platform in the past are starting to convert, but they still need certain layout and functionality that is not possible with traditional themes.
3. An attempt to break away from the blog look.
   The standard blog themes are a turn-off to many visitors, and magazine themes offer more opportunities for a visually appealing design.
4. Multi-author blogs.
   Many blogs that use magazine themes are mutli-authored. These blogs will typically produce more content and have more variety of content, which makes a magazine theme more ideal.

Pros and Cons

Each style of theme has its own strengths and weaknesses. They should always be considered in the context of a particular blog in order to determine what type of theme will work best in that specific situation.

Pros of Magazine Themes

1. More content is featured on the front page

The primary reason for using a magazine-style theme is to show your visitors a greater amount of content from the front page. Of course, they’ll only be seeing small bits of information on several different topics, as opposed to simply seeing the latest post as would be the case with a traditional blog theme layout.

Most blogs contain a large amount of content and the tradition blog layout only allows for a small portion of the most recent content to be featured. Visitors may arrive at a blog with a magazine layout and see headlines and excerpts from 4 or 5 different posts above the fold. Obviously, this gives them more options and the chances are better that they’ll find something of interest to them.

2. More control over what is featured

Just as important as featuring more posts is the ability to easily control which posts are featured and for how long. The traditional blog layout will always give the most prominent location to the most recent post (although this can be modified to some degree with plugins). A magazine theme gives the blogger the ability to control what is featured by categorizing a new post appropriately.

The location of the new post on the blog front page will be controlled by the category assigned to the blog (in most cases), so all the blogger has to do is decide where the post should be shown and place it in the appropriate category. The ProBlogger front page has a slot for a recent featured post as well as a slot for a video post.

3. Potential for improved navigation

Magazine-style themes have the opportunity to make logical navigation easier for visitors because more content is visible on the front page and options should be made clear. However, a magazine layout that isn’t well organized can lead to more clutter and confusion. Those magazine themes that successfully improve the navigational experience for visitors will do a good job of separating the content so that visitors know where to go to find what they are seeking.

The front page of Dazed Digital makes it easy for visitors to see the various types of content that is available on the site, such as fashion, music, arts & culture, and photography.

4. More professional look

While there are plenty of blogs with traditional themes that are well-designed and extremely attractive, there are exponentially more blogs that feature a very typical blog theme that some visitors find to be boring. Using a magazine-style theme certainly doesn’t guarantee a more professional look, but because it can help to get rid of the typical blog look it can help to make a site look more corporate image and less of a blog appearance.

Boxwish is a new site dedicated to movies. It uses a magazine-style layout to give the site a very professional and attractive look.

5. More appropriate for large sites

The typical blog layout doesn’t work well for blogs that post a large amount of content on a consistent basis. Because it doesn’t allow for flexibility in terms of what is featured on the front page and because less content will be given a prominent location, there may be a lot of valuable content that is getting less exposure than it deserves. A magazine theme is better equipped to handle several posts per day without any of them getting lost in the shuffle.

Popvine is a celebrity news and gossip site that publishes a large amount of content. Its layout allows much more to be visible on the front page than a traditional blog layout would allow.

6. Can lead to better use of categories

Most blogs use categories ineffectively and inconsistently. Because the order and placement of content on the front page of a magazine theme is so heavily dependent on the categorization of posts, it can force the blogger to be more careful with the chosen categories, which may lead to more usefulness of the system.

Cons of Magazine Themes:

1. Can be more work for the blogger

Depending on the theme you’re using, you may be forced to use custom fields and to pay more attention to the length of your custom excerpts. The tasks involved with posting to a magazine theme are pretty minor, but they will typically take a few minutes for each post. In general, premium themes will be easier and less time-consuming than free themes. Developers of premium themes are much more likely to take the time to develop advanced options from the dashboard that will make things easier for users.

2. Blogs with infrequent posts can look awkward

Because magazine themes feature such a variety of content on the front page, a blog that doesn’t post frequently can leave older content on the front page in prominent locations for much longer than with a traditional blog theme. This can make the blog look more outdated and less professional. Depending on the subject of your posts they may or may not be time sensitive.

3. The appearance can be overwhelming or cluttered

Well-designed magazine themes will maintain a good balance and will avoid clutter. However, it’s very easy to end up with a jumbled look by using a magazine theme that tries to cram too much content into the spaces available. Overdoing it will cause some visitors to be overwhelmed with too many options that aren’t clear and they’re likely to leave without navigating through the site.

4. Price

A high percentage of premium themes available for sale are magazine-style. While there are some good free options, there are less quality choices than there are for traditional blog themes. Additionally, developing a custom magazine theme will typically be more expensive and time consuming than developing a traditional theme, primarily because there is some extra coding that is involved.

5. Requires more clicks from visitors

With a traditional blog theme that displays full posts on the front page, visitors may be able to read several posts without even clicking off of the hompage. With a magazine theme, visitors will have only very small excerpts or maybe just headlines on the front page, and they’ll need to click to a specific post to read anything.

6. May be unfamiliar to some blog visitors

Although many people find traditional blog layouts to be lacking in terms of attractiveness, those who read a lot of blogs will be very familiar with the standard blog navigation, such as category links, popular post lists, date archives, blogrolls etc. These visitors may be less comfortable with the navigation and usability with a magazine theme, although this is becoming less of an issue as more blogs are moving to this style.

Considerations for Choosing a Style of Theme

Looking at the pros and cons may lead to a bit of confusion for bloggers, because it’s not a one-sided issue. Because each blog has a unique purpose and a different approach to presenting information, each case should be considered individually to decide on the right style of theme. Here are some factors that should be considered.

1. Impact on Visitors

While many bloggers are switching to magazine themes because they find them to be more attractive and less like a standard blog, the impact of the theme on visitors should also be considered when deciding on the type of theme. As the pros and cons were covered, many of them were based on how the theme impacts the user experience. The navigation (number of clicks, familiarity, etc) will be one of the major differences between the two styles of themes. Additionally, the amount of content on the front page will be a major impact on the user experience. For sites that draw visitors looking for news-related topics, they like to be able to see a lot of headlines to find something of interest.

2. Impression of Size

Because many of the websites using a magazine layout are major news websites, there is a certain impression of size given to visitors when they encounter a blog with a magazine-style theme. Blogs using a more traditional layout may seem like a smaller site to new visitors than the same blog would appear if it were using a magazine theme. Although a traditional blog layout can give the impression of a smaller site, many blog readers will appreciate the feel of being on a more personal level with the blogger, as opposed to feeling like they’re on a large impersonal site with many different authors.

3. Frequency of Posts

It was mentioned earlier that magazine-style themes can look awkward or outdated if posts are few and far between, and for this reason the actual or anticipated frequency of posting should be a major consideration when deciding on a theme style.

4. Diversity of Content

The use of categories by magazine themes can do more than just control what content is featured and for how long. Additionally, magazine themes can help to separate content in a way that is easier to manage and more usable for readers.

For example, take the Macalicious theme layout. There are three slots on the front page for featured posts: Recent News, Rumors, and Tips & Tricks. Visitors can quickly see what’s available and they can visualize the distinction of content much better than they could with a traditional layout where all categories were lumped together in one loop.

5. Niche

While websites and blogs in specific niches tend to be similar to one another in their approach, the typical blog readers in various niches will also have some common expectations from the sites that they visit. If your blog is in a news-related niche, almost all other blogs in your niche are probably already using a magazine theme. In other niches it may be just the opposite. While being unique is generally a good thing, be sure that you’re not alienating a major portion of your readers by using a style of layout that makes them uncomfortable with the site.

Tutorials for Designing a Magazine Theme

If you’re looking to learn more about creating your own magazine themes, NETTUTS is the best resource available. They have several different tutorials that teach different approaches or aspects of the magazine layout.

• Prototype a Magazine-Style Homepage Template with the Blueprint CSS Framework
  This tutorial is a good starting point for learning the process of designing and laying out a magazine theme on a grid. You’ll be taken through the process of setting up the grid and the HTML/CSS code.
• Build a Newspaper Theme with WP_Query and the 960 CSS Framework
  Using the popular 960 Grid System you’ll be able to create a newspaper or magazine layout the uses WordPress’s functionality to control which posts are shown in different sections of the front page.
• Build a Basic Newspaper Style Layout with WordPress and jQuery
  This tutorial uses jQuery to create size-degrading headers that will keep your grid looking professional.
• Build a Featured Post Section in WordPress
  Most magazine themes will have a prominent spot on the front page for posts in a featured category. This will allow you to highlight new and popular content in the right locations and not overpower them with subsequent posts that may not be as important.
• Which CSS Grid Framework Should You Use for Web Design?
  This is an extremely in-depth article that explains the purpose of grid frameworks and lists tons of resources.

Darren Hoyt is one of the designers of Mimbo Pro, one of the more popular premium magazine themes for WordPress. On his blog he’s written a few posts that will be helpful for designers and developers of magazine themes:

• In Praise of WordPress Template Tags, Part II: The Magazine Layout
  Darren takes a look at the Mimbo theme (the free version) and how it manages to pull off the magazine layout. This article is obviously helpful for anyone using and customizing Mimbo, but many of the same concepts are applicable to developing your own magazine theme.
• Creating Two-Tiered Conditional Navigation in WordPress
  While this type of navigation isn’t exclusive to magazine themes, these sites do tend to be larger and in greater need of more advanced navigation that the traditional blog.
• Combining Featured Posts Within the Standard Loop
  WordPress users often want posts in magazine themes to be displayed in ways that can be a bit tricky. Darren provides an example situation with one of his clients and he provides the code for his solution to the layout issues.

HeadsetOptions.org has published a series of posts that break down the main issues regarding development of a magazine-style layout in WordPress:

• Anatomy of a Magazine Style Premium WordPress Theme: Prelude
• Part 1 — The Loop
• Part 2 — DOMtab, Tabber, and More
• Part 3.1 — Navigation - Second Lavel Menu
• Part 3.2 — Conditional Navigation Menus

Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks recently published a tutorial Creating a Slick Auto-Playing Featured Content Slider. Chris approach could be used to work with a featured post section on the front page of a magazine layout.

When developing a magazine theme for WordPress you’ll need to do some things with the loop that aren’t a concern with a standard blog theme, including the use of multiple loops. Perishable Press has a helpful tutorial that provides the code that they use for a theme with 3 different loops, the Perishable Press Triple Loop for WordPress.

Cats Who Code has a helpful tutorial for creating an effective navigation menu for your own magazine theme. You can learn how to create an advanced dropdown menu quickly in WordPress: “Magazine Style” Horizontal Dropdown Menu.

Speckyboy put together a nice collection of the Top 30 Modern Web Designs (Magazine Style Showcase). This post is excellent for seeing the magazine layout on some major news websites and others that certainly don’t feature a traditional blog layout.

Resources for Grid-Based Design

Many magazine themes are built on a grid to establish the structure of the site. If you’re interested in becoming more familiar with grid-based design, these resources can help.

Grids are Good
This is a PDF of a PowerPoint presentation at SXSW by grid experts Khoi Vinh and Mark Boulton.

Five Simple Steps to Designing Grid Systems
Mark Boulton’s detailed series on getting started with grid-based design.

Oh Yeeaahh!
Khoi Vinh takes a look at how Yahoo could be improved if it were designed on a grid.

Grid-Based Design: Six Creative Column Techniques
Smashing Magazine’s look at designing on a grid. Sean Hodge takes a look at several different approaches to grid-based design with plenty of examples.

Grid and Column Designs
Nick La of Web Designer Wall put together a gallery of 32 excellent examples of grid-based design and he categorized them to help demonstrate the possibilities and various approaches.

960 Grid System
This framework was mention earlier regarding a link to a tutorial. Nathan Smith developed the 960 Grid System in attempt to simply the development process for others. Give it a try and see if you like working with a framework or starting on your own from scratch.

Blueprint
Another CSS framework and grid is Blueprint. Several notable designers took part in the development of Blueprint.

YUI Grids CSS
Yahoo! also has their own CSS framework that can help for designing on a grid.

Free Magazine-Style Themes for WordPress

If you’re looking to use a free WordPress theme to or to customize one for yourself, there are several quality choices available.

One of the most popular free magazine themes is Mimbo by Darren Hoyt.

Branford Magazine is another excellent choice that was inspired by Mimbo and Revolution.

Rebel Magazine by default will display five excerpts on the front page and it also includes an area in the sidebar for video.

For more of the best free magazine themes, see:

• 20 of the Best Free Magazine WordPress Themes from Pingable
• Free Magazine-Style WordPress Theme Gallery from Hack WordPress
• 45+ Free WordPress Themes with Magazine or Grid Layouts from WPZOOM

Premium Magazine-Style Themes for WordPress

While free magazine themes are becoming more popular, a very high percentage of premium WordPress themes available for purchase are designed with a magazine-style layout. Here are a few of the better premium themes.

Magazine News is built specifically for sites with lots of content and it’s built to support AdSense or other types of ads.

Darren Hoyt and Ben Gillbanks also offer Mimbo Pro, which is a more advanced, user-friendly version than the free theme.

The Gazette Edition is one of several quality themes offered by WooThemes. It has the clean, professional look of a major news site.

Fresh News is another theme from WooThemes. This one offers the user a choice of three homepage layouts.

Brian Gardner’s popular Revolution series includes Revolution Magazine, a very professional and customizable option.

Quommunication News is a clean theme that makes full use of categories.

For more of the best premium magazine themes, see:

• Best News and Magazine Style Premium WordPress Theme Gallery from Premium WordPress
• Premium WordPress Themes Gallery from Hack WordPress
• 100 Premium WordPress Themes from Outlaw Design Blog

About the Author

Steven Snell is a web designer and freelance blogger. He maintains his own blog at Vandelay Website Design.

Lisa Katayama via Boing Boing shared by 8 people

Archeologists in Mexico think they might have discovered Xibalba, a mythical Mayan underworld also known as the "place of fear." After some serious scuba diving and inching across deeply submerged underwater tunnels near the Yucatan peninsula, investigators reached an entrance to a bunch of dry chambers with the stone ruins of eleven sacred temples and a 330-foot long road. There were also lots and lots of human bones. According to the ancient Mayan scripture Popol Vuh, the entrance to Xibalba was once protected by rivers filled with blood, scorpions, and pus, and houses swarming with shrieking bats.

Link to Reuters article
Xibalba on Wikipedia (Thanks, Baker!)

( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)

via http://www.ecofriend.org/entry/eco-friendly-domespace-houses-gyrate-to-make-the-best-of-sun/

via http://community.livejournal.com/pearlsandtea/173375.html#cutid1

Muhammad Saleem via ReadWriteWeb shared by 4 people

There has been a lot of speculation recently about an impending update to iTunes. Version 8.0, among other things, is supposed to finally bring a recommendation engine to the digital media player application. While that's interesting from a music discovery perspective, it is even more interesting to consider what this could mean in terms of an iTunes+iPhone based social networking experience.

iTunes (launched 2001) and the iTunes music store (launched 2003) have come a long way since they were first launched. The application has gone through various iterations, gaining significant features such as podcasts (2005), videos (2007), games, and applications (2008) along the way. In the process, selling billions of songs, millions of movies, and over 10 million applications in the first week of the app store's launch. Needless to say Apple has built an experience that with all it's parts combined is unparalleled in both its features and the breadth of its catalog of content.

The Software Side

While most of that is common knowledge, what most people overlook is the glaring lack of any community aspect to iTunes. There are millions of people, many of them with similar tastes, flocking to the same destination every day, yet they never interact with each other... because they can't. If Kevin Rose is to be believed, however, (as discussed on TWiT 157) that all is about to change with iTunes 8.0.

He says, '... the one thing I hear about iTunes 8.0 is that it's gonna do something along the lines of, um, looking at your music, and, uh, kind of recommendations based on certain things.' In other words, the next version of iTunes will monitor your media purchasing and consuming habits and correlate them with everyone else using the system to figure out which songs you will probably like but haven't bought/listened to. If you're a fan of collaborative filtering systems or internet radio (Pandora, Last.fm, etc), you're probably familiar with the idea already and that iTunes may be considering implementing this doesn't come as a surprise (I found myself wondering why this wasn't introduced 2-3 years ago).

While this feature itself isn't social and can be implemented entirely on the back end, the implementation required for that functionality is so close to a networked experience (monitoring of habits and correlation across users) that they might as well take a small next step and add a visible social layer with which those users can interact. In fact, if you look at the results from a 2006 iTunes survey, you will see the people want to be able to see what people with similar interests and tastes (i.e. friends) are purchasing and consuming, so they can experiment with and pick from the same selection. More specifically, consumers want:

1. The ability to view a friend's wish list, with permission.
2. The ability to view what a friend is currently listening to, with permission.
3. The ability to view a friend's playlist, with permission.
4. The ability to view a friend's recent purchases, with permission.
5. The ability to view a friend's favorite artists, with permission

What's also interesting about this approach is that it reaches the exact opposite conclusions of EMR's UK social networking study [PDF]. The study implies that social networks will be the content distribution channels of tomorrow, but the relationship may actually work better in the other direction. With the addition of networking and recommendation features to iTunes, the application could become the most efficient, most engaging, stickiest (always-on), and most profitable social network almost overnight.

But Apple's social networking potential doesn't end there. Remember Microsoft's 'welcome to the social' campaign that centered around the launch of its Zune digital media player? If you don't, you're not alone. The goal behind the campaign, 'to create a shared, social experience that will be shaped by the collective imagination of consumers and will inspire discovery of new music and artists,' was actually a formidable one. Unfortunately an inferior device, coupled with disasterous software integration made the campaign a $100 million failure.

Enter Apple.

The Hardware Side

With a formidable install base, great hardware and one of the most versatile mobile operating systems around, the iPhone is ready to herald in the future of mobile social networking. Furthermore, with 3G/EDGE/WiFi/GPS capabilities, the iPhone is a great tool for both networking as well as wirelessly sharing digital media like the Zune promised (but failed miserably at). Not only does the device work seamlessly with the iTunes software, but Apple's DRM is more consistent and perhaps more forgiving that Microsoft's (which was partly responsible for crippling the Zune's ambitions).

The Cloud

With a firm grasp on the software side with iTunes and on the hardware side with the iPhone, Apple is in good shape. Their killer app, however, could end up being the cloud. Apple already operates MobileMe (previously .Mac) which faciliates the management of contacts, calendars (events), email, photos, and any other files or digital media. Admittedly the service has been an utter failure since launch, but Apple has acknowledge the failure and is on the path to fix its shortcomings.

The previously discussed iTunes social networking and collaborative filtering (recommendations) system, coupled with the iPhone's versatile wireless communication and media sharing capabilities, topped off with media and information management (and sharing) in the cloud, the combo is no doubt ready to be our digital life (and relationship) manager. The only limitation of the network, however, (and it will be a deal breaker for many) is that unlike every other social network today, the experience will come at a steep cost. Knowing Apple though, I have no doubt it will be an experience worth the cost (especially considering what they had to deal with at the MobileMe launch).

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow Muhammad on Twitter.

Andrew Sullivan via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan shared by 5 people

Readers know my personal disdain for Bill Clinton. But longtime readers will also know I have always defended his solid centrist, smart record in office and defended him against his most over-reaching enemies. Tonight, I think, was one of the best speeches he has ever given. It was a direct, personal and powerful endorsement of Obama. But much, much more than that: it was a statesman-like assessment of where this country is and how desperately it needs a real change toward reform and retrenchment at home and restoration of diplomacy, wisdom and prudence abroad. Yes, he nailed it with this line:

"People around the world have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power."

I don't buy his evisceration of everything the Republican party has done in the last quarter century. I think the GOP did a great deal to rescue this country in the 1980s and early 1990s.

In fact, I think Clinton would have failed as a president without the foil of the Gingrich GOP. But since 2000, the worst aspects of Republicanism have crowded out its once necessary virtues. The reflexive impulse to use force over diplomacy, to use aggression over persuasion, to spend and borrow with no concern for the future, and to violate sacred principles such as the eschewal of torture with no respect for the past: these must not just be left behind. They have to be repudiated.

The United States needs this repudiation, as does the world. McCain, alas, cannot provide it. He may once have. But his party is too far gone, and his moment passed. His use of fear and deception and brattish contempt in this campaign have sealed the deal for me. But Clinton reminded all of us of what is more broadly at stake. He did it with passion and measure and eloquence. And surpassing intelligence.

We've seen the worst of Bill Clinton these past few months, Tonight, we saw the best. And it's mighty good.

(Photo: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty.)

Unobtainium is any very rare, expensive, or impossible material needed to suit a particular application.

Engineers have long (since at least the 1950s) used the term unobtainium when referring to unusual or costly materials, or when theoretically considering a material perfect for their needs in all respects save that it doesn't exist. By the 1990s, the term was widely used, including formal engineering papers. (As an example, Towards unobtainium [new composite materials for space applications], by Misra and Mohan describes how the ideal material (unobtainium) would weigh almost nothing, but be very stiff and dimensionally stable over large temperature ranges.)

(via migurski)

(link)

Brian Clark via RSSmeme shared by 4 people

Shared nine times Tagged Content Marketing (109)

Who needs to learn how to read?

After all, we all learned how to read fairly early in life, usually in elementary school, right?

But do you know how to really read?

More importantly, are you really reading?

Reading can make you a better writer, as long as you’re paying attention and leaving time to actually write. But what we’re talking about here is what you say, rather than how you say it.

If you haven’t noticed, competition in the world of online content is fierce. Anyone playing to win is searching high and low for information that others don’t have, which for many means subscribing to a ridiculous number of RSS feeds.

While seeking out novel information from a wide variety of sources is admirable, it doesn’t necessarily give you an advantage. The ancient Greeks had a label for those who were widely read but not well read—they called them sophomores.

As in sophomoric… not a second-year college student (I suppose there’s not really much of a distinction).

Scanners and Pleasure Seekers

We know that people don’t read well online. They ruthlessly scan for interesting chunks of information rather than digesting the whole, and they want to be entertained in the process. This is the reality that online publishers deal with, so we disguise our nuggets of wisdom with friendly formatting and clever analogies.

But that doesn’t mean you should read that way.

If you’ve been publishing online for even a small amount of time, you’ve seen someone leave a comment that clearly demonstrates they didn’t read or understand the content. Even more painful is when someone writes a responsive post that clearly misses the entire point of the original article.

While it happens to all of us from time to time, you do not want to consistently be one of these people. Credibility is hard enough to establish without routinely demonstrating that you fail to grasp a topic that you’ve chosen to write about, whether in an article or a comment.

Plus, if you’re doing nothing but scanning hundreds of RSS feeds and reading purely to be entertained, you’re at a disadvantage. Someone in your niche or industry is likely reading books and reading deeper to become the higher authority.

Or they will after they read this article.

Information vs. Understanding

People often think of learning as an information-gathering and retention process. But being able to recall and regurgitate information is low-level learning compared with insightful understanding.

Bloggers are big on regurgitation. These cut-and-paste creatives add value to the world through a mash-up of sources, right? Maybe, but without the ability to understand and communicate what it all means for the reader, you’re simply passing on your reading obligations to others, and that’s not giving people what they look for in a publication.

On the other hand, if you understand everything you read upon a casual once over, are you truly learning anything new? The material that gives you an edge in the insight department is the stuff that’s harder to understand. In other words, the writer is your superior when it comes to that particular subject matter, and it’s your job to close the expertise gap by reading well.

You do that by moving beyond learning by instruction, and increasing your true understanding by discovery. For example, you read a challenging book full of great information, and you understand enough of it to know that you don’t understand all of it.

At that point, you can dive into the book again and read more carefully. You can go to supplemental resources. You can read other books. All that matters is you do the work rather than asking someone, and I guarantee you’re really learning in the process.

For example, next time you read a challenging blog post and you’re not clear on a point, your first inclination might be to ask a question in the comments. Instead, read the post again. If it’s still not clear, go do some research on your own to see if you can figure it out. Then when you finally do ask a question, you’re on an entirely different level of understanding and can likely engage in a meaningful dialogue with the author.

Instruction is important and beneficial. But true understanding comes from your own exploration and discovery along the path.

The Four Levels of Reading

Back in 1940, a guy named Mortimer J. Adler jolted the “widely read” into realizing they might not be well read with a book called How to Read a Book. Updated in 1973 and still going strong today, How to Read a Book identifies four levels of reading:

• Elementary
• Inspectional
• Analytical
• Syntopical

Each of these reading levels is cumulative. You can’t progress to a higher level without mastering the levels that come before.

1. Elementary Reading – Aptly named, elementary reading consists of remedial literacy, and it’s usually achieved during the elementary schooling years. Sadly, many high schools and colleges must offer remedial reading courses to ensure that elementary reading levels are maintained, but very little instruction in advanced reading is offered.

2. Inspectional Reading – Scanning and superficial reading are not evil, as long as approached as an active process that serves an appropriate purpose. Inspectional reading means giving a piece of writing a quick yet meaningful advance review in order to evaluate the merits of a deeper reading experience.

There are two types:

• Skimming: This is the equivalent of scanning a blog post to see if you want to read it carefully. You’re checking the title, the subheads, and you’re selectively dipping in and out of content to gauge interest. The same can be done with a book—go beyond the dust jacket and peruse the table of contents and each chapter, but give yourself a set amount of time to do it.
• Superficial: Superficial reading is just that… you simply read. You don’t ponder, and you don’t stop to look things up. If you don’t get something, you don’t worry about it. You’re basically priming yourself to read again at a higher level if the subject matter is worthy.

Stopping at inspectional reading is only appropriate if you find no use for the material. Unfortunately, this is all the reading some people do in preparation for their own writing.

3. Analytical Reading – At this level of reading, you’ve moved beyond superficial reading and mere information absorption. You’re now engaging your critical mind to dig down into the meaning and motivation beyond the text. To get a true understanding of a book, you would:

• Identify and classify the subject matter as a whole
• Divide it into main parts and outline those parts
• Define the problem(s) the author is trying to solve
• Understand the author’s terms and key words
• Grasp the author’s important propositions
• Know the author’s arguments
• Determine whether the author solves the intended problems
• Show where the author is uninformed, misinformed, illogical or incomplete

You’ll note that the inspectional reading you did perfectly sets the stage for an analytical reading. But so far, we’re talking about reading one book. The highest level of reading allows you to synthesize knowledge from a comparative reading of several books about the same subject.

4. Syntopical Reading – It’s been said that anyone can read five books on a topic and be an expert. That may be true, but how you read those five books will make all the difference. If you read those five books analytically, you will become an expert on what five authors have said. If you read five books syntopically, you will develop your own unique perspective and expertise in the field.

In other words, syntopical reading is not about the existing experts. It’s about you and the problems you’re trying to solve, in this case for your own readers. In this sense, the books you read are simply tools that allow you to form an understanding that’s never quite existed before. You’ve melded the information in those books with your own life experience and other knowledge to make novel connections and new insights. You, my friend, are now an expert in your own right.

Here are the five steps to syntopical reading:

• Inspection: Inspectional reading is critical to syntopical reading. You must quickly indentify which five (or 15) books you need to read from a sea of unworthy titles. Then you must also quickly identify the relevant parts and passages that satisfy your unique focus.
• Assimilation: In analytical reading, you identify the author’s chosen language by spotting the author’s terms of art and key words. This time, you assimilate the language of each author into the terms of art and key words that you choose, whether by agreeing with the language of one author or devising your own terminology.
• Questions: This time, the focus is on what questions you want answered (problems solved), as opposed to the problems each author wants to solve. This may require that you draw inferences if any particular author does not directly address one of your questions. If any one author fails to address any of your questions, you messed up at the inspection stage.
• Issues: When you ask a good question, you’ve identified an issue. When experts have differing or contradictory responses to the same question, you’re able to flesh out all sides of an issue, based on the existing literature. When you understand multiple perspectives within an individual issue, you can intelligently discuss the issue, and come to your own conclusion (which may differ from everyone else, thereby expanding the issue and hopefully adding unique value).
• Conversation: Determining the “truth” via syntopical reading is not really the point, since disagreements about truth abound with just about any topic. The value is found within the discussion among competing view points concerning the same root information, and you’re now conversant enough to hold your own in a discussion of experts. This is what the “online conversation” was supposed to look like according to early bloggers, and sometimes, it does. But mostly, the online conversation looks like the unqualified, unsubstantiated opinions of the ill-informed, and you’re not looking to be part of that scene.

Be a Demanding Reader for the Win

Reading, at its fundamental essence, is not about absorbing information. It’s about asking questions, looking for answers, understanding the various answers, and deciding for yourself. Think of reading this way, and you quickly realize how this allows you to deliver unique value to your readers as a publisher.

If you think all of this sounds like a lot of work, well… you’re right. And most people won’t do it, just like most people will never blog or publish online in the first place.

That’s why your readers need you. They need you to do the work for them, because they don’t want to become an expert. So, it’s your job to understand the complex and grasp the essentials, then make it simple, easy to read, and entertaining.

You’re on it, right?

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"Feeling of Security"

"Kennedy Space Center"