SmartyPants is a free web publishing plug-in for Movable Type, Blosxom, and BBEdit that easily translates plain ASCII punctuation characters into “smart” typographic punctuation HTML entities.
SmartyPants can perform the following transformations:

• Straight quotes ( " and ' ) into “curly” quote HTML entities
• Backticks-style quotes (``like this'') into “curly” quote HTML entities
• Dashes (“--” and “---”) into en- and em-dash entities
• Three consecutive dots (“...”) into an ellipsis entity

I was thinking of writing an equivalent for Radio, but even though I'm a trained typographer, I think it's too much of a problem when quoting from sites that use smart punc, I'll skip it.

1472 Also posted to: Home page . At: 8:41:19 PM  . .
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Other title(s) for this story: SmartyPants

"Most Little Seen, Quickly Abandoned
Survey of 3,634 blogs on eight leading blog-hosting services to develop a model of blog populations. Based on this research, Perseus estimates that 4.12 million blogs have been created on these services: Blog-City, BlogSpot, Diaryland, LiveJournal, Pitas, TypePad, Weblogger and Xanga.

• 92.4% of blogs created by people under the age of 30.
• Females are slightly more likely than males to create blogs, accounting for 56.0% of hosted blogs.
• the number of hosted blogs created to exceed five million by the end of 2003 and to exceed ten million by the end of 2004.
• Those who abandoned blogs tended to write posts that were only 58% as long as the posts of those who still maintained blogs, which simply indicates that those who enjoy writing stick with blogs longer."

1469 Also posted to: Home page . At: 12:55:51 PM  . .
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Other title(s) for this story: The Blogging Iceberg

"Applying the Three-Click Rule leads to a number of design suggestions, such as putting global navigation on every page and making a navigation hierarchy shallow and wide. While these suggestions seem a natural extension of the Three-Click Rule, they assume the rule is worth following."

Very good article. I've always believed that there are no sites on the internet, all pages.
If you enter a site via a search engine, and have the time, you'll look deeper than three clicks if the page you landed on is close enough to your search criteria. If it ain't you're outta there to the next of the search result. If you enter via a link on someone else's site, you'll look for three clicks, possibly more if the navigation is good and informative enough.

In short, most people navigate via search engines. Build your site for these, not testers entering your site via the front page. And, make sure your navigation is detailed, categories/sections well differentiated.

1468 Also posted to: Home page . At: 12:46:51 PM  . .
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Other title(s) for this story: Testing the Three-Click Rule