Kausfiles- Mickey Kaus

Length of Text: Mickey Kaus keeps his postings relatively short and almost always limited to a paragraph. His sentences are clean and thorough.

Scanability: Kaus' postings are suitable for scanning. The page format is easy on the eyes as there isn't a whole lot of distraction. Occasionally he will highlight a sentence or two that are the most important in the paragraph, so even if you just read those few lines you get a sense of the paragraph.

Chunking: If a posting of Kaus' is longer than a paragraph, it's usually because he is adding an excerpt or quote. The excerpt or quote is offset from Kaus' text. He may also chunk together different posts when they are within the same day or add an additional P.S. or P.S.S posts as well.

Headlines: He tends to keep his headlines around five words or under. The headlines seem to be vague but interesting. For example, Kaus' latest headline reads: Obama v. Pajama.


Copy Editing: Kaus doesn't follow any strict rules like AP Style, he seems to write in a concise manner with excitement. He writes in a way that you would expect of a blogger's style, but doesn't make the spelling errors that average bloggers do.

Use of inverted Pyramid: As Kaus' postings are usually condensed to one paragraph so he doesn't need to use the inverted pyramid format.

Page Titles: The page title is the same for every page of his postings: kausfiles.com It's a very clean page so you don't get lost or confused when browsing through.

Legibility: His page is very clean and can be boring, unless you are very interested in what he has to say. The text that draws the most attention are his bold sentences or phrases.

This week:Kaus' short posting is about an "unnamed Obama aide's "take off the pajamas" jibe". I don't follow politics closely and Kaus always seems to know about all of the dirt that goes on so his postings aren't always clear to me. He says that bloggers should not calm down and to keep Obama on his toes.

Oct. 6

Mickey Kaus' blog linked to Slate is a pretty clean site. The page is fairly long but there are only two ads on the site and they are small. As you scroll down, all you can see are his postings on a white background. It's a very simple site and that is convenient.

The font on Kaus' site is in a simple font that looks like size 12 font. It's more modern looking that Times New Roman. Links are in blue and important phrases are in bold.

I have a wireless internet connection and when I use the university's internet connection, Kaus' page loads almost instantly with the ad taking the longest time to load- which doesn't bother me at all.

Kaus always attributes his quotes properly but actually rarely uses quotes. He, more than often, rephrases someone's point and links it assuming you already know what he's talking about.

There is hardly any ads on the site and he often links sites that only refer to what he is talking about (usually a news article, press release or a political figure's blog). It seems like his audience is pretty dedicated to his blogging and he seems like a straightforward no-nonsense kind of guy.

Kaus' page is very simple. His blogs are separated by a little red line and the Kausfiles blog post takes up the left side of the screen while the popular tags, most read/emailed frames are on the right for about half a page.