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I love Jakob for a lot of reasons, but most of all because he sides with the user, the customer, the human being who wants to just FIND THE DAMN INFORMATION. I haven't met a single Web user outside the industry who wants to be "entertianed," "captured" or forced to "experience" a splash page that leads nowhere if the plug-in doesn't work or the user happens to use yesterday's browser or minority hardware. The fact that real users -- all zillion of them -- remain invisible to the New Economy's unsolicited and vastly overpaid entertainers makes Jakob Nielsen a damn hero. It was Jakob who (to my knowledge, anyway) first called the Cluetrain authors "defectors" from marketing. Like him, we sided with markets -- human beings -- against those who cluelessly continue to attack and insult them. I feel extreme conceptual solidarity with Jakob. On our side -- the markets' side -- are a zillion users ... no, make that customers, who constitute what economists call "demand." On the other side is the latest incarnation of marketing, talking new economy trash to itself while continuing to ignore the practical needs of people who just need to find stuff. On the phone a few minutes ago a friend of mine lamented the "dullness" of Jakob's site designs (including the design for Searls.com, which I ripped off, tag for tag, from one of Jakob's creations). He said Jakob's latest book, the bestselling Designing Web Usability led to designs as dull as its title. Well hey, I love art. But I can use artless practicality. Here's what you get with Jakob's advice: sites that work. At their best those sites give blessedly clean white space, like Salon used to have, and Google still does. At their worst, they're dull as dirt; but they still get us easy-to-find and easy-to-read information. Nothing wrong with that. Congratulations, Jakob.
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That's 500 years in Internet Time: 
