Previewing links on a blog - does it make navigation easier ?

One of my newest readers told me that navigating on the internet is like "starting off trying to find one single item in the Istanbul Grand Bazaar, and before you know it, the day has gone and you have wandered into some impenetrable corner."

It is true, with so many links one can get lost in the blogosphere, on the other hand it is one of those great aspects of the web that all is interconnected and every link might lead to another gem of information.

To help everyone and this reader in particular (yes you Tony ;-) I just implemented Snap, a little widget that gives you now a preview of what you will find if you click a link on my blog. That way you can decide from the preview if you want to go there or not.

On the other hand it uses some kind of pop up and I do not know if the average reader will appreciate this new thing on my blog. So please, let me know what you think of it. If I get a majority of people who tell me this is more annoying than anything else, I'll take it off again.

Thanks for the feedback.

Technorati : blog, links, navigation, preview, snap

Update on Thursday, December 14, 2006 at 17:02 by Philippe Borremans

After some very constructive comments from my readers about the implementation of Snap on this blog I decided to take out the "preview". Image previews of the links are nice, but text, a headline and content would be better.

Comments

[Serge]

BRRR. It's horrible... ;-) No, seriously - it reminds me a bit of Browster (www.browster.com) - an application that gives you a preview of links without having to click them. Once you get used to it, it does save you a lot of time. So: no problem where I am concerned.

[Andy Hoppe]

"It is more annoying than anything else - but the idea has got potential."

What I mean: At the scale of the previews, one can only see the layout of the target page, not its text content, In the blogosphere, the content is what counts, not the packaging. So while it's a nice gadget, it basically entices people to let the visual appearance determine the importance or relevancy of a page, rather than the quality of the information presented there. That's soooo Web 1.0! ;o)

But the idea of a link preview is good... so how about having a content preview rather than a layout preview? It would be easy to do... just show the page title, first few lines of the first paragraph, scaled-to-fit representation of the main image, and a list of all subsequent headlines on the page. That should give people a great idea of what the target site is about, plus it would even work for screen readers etc. :o)

Cheers,

Andy

P.S.: My blog is still not done. Had too many meetings about accessibility here at WHO, so I decided to recode it all in XHTML 1.1 Strict and make sure all templates output screen-reader friendly code. But I'm getting there - maybe be the end of the year, I hope :o)

[BelgaBlog.be]

Dont't like too much these pop-ups, but maybe because I'm not (yet) used to them. Seems bit commercial crap...

[Philippe Borremans]

Thanks everyone for your feedback.

I completely agree with Andy, instead of images the preview should give us text, a headline, the first paragraph, in short; content.

So I am taking this out of my blog and will try to give this feedback to the people from Snap.