One thing about weblogs that has always been somewhat of an annoyance to me is the persistent use of the narrative format for entries. Long and wordy narratives are well-suited to books by Charles Dickens; they don't work that well on web pages, particularly weblog pages. Many entries by How Appealing represent the quintessential example of this approach: entries which are quite often long paragraphs, chock-full of links to stories and other objets trouves, with virtually no commentary or editorializing. A typical "Elsewhere in Wednesday's newspapers" entry for December 24 includes a paragraph consisting of 22 lines with 15 separate links to newspaper stories -- and that is just one of the four paragraphs in that entry. Howard has one of the leading weblogs in the legal field, and his accomplishments cannot be doubted, but his approach is not the best use of the weblog as internet media. These long paragraphs, broken up by links, are very difficult to scan and peruse intelligently.
Today I came across a site which offers a very well-presented alternative form of display: CyberAttorney. The entries are presented in tables, using a separate row for each item, and with the date/time, the link, the commentary, and a link to comments presented in separate columns. This alternative, which borrows from spreadsheets and word processor tables, is much more pleasing to the eye and better suited to the web browsing experience.
9:52:19 PM 
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