In the decision by Topix, an aggregator and tagger of local news, to remake itself as a blogging platform, there's a lesson for other ventures: don't be too innovative, at least not in the user interface. Founder Rich Skrenta, in a breathtakingly honest account of the Topix about-face, says users had no idea what the site was about. The reason? Tribune-backed Topix, as neither a blog, nor search engine, was unfamiliar to the internet's conservative users. Restless web entrepreneurs are always trying to reinvent formats: Powerset wants to enable natural language queries, despite evidence that users are quite happy just typing in a word or two to a search box. One of Gawker's biggest failures was a site called Sploid, which tried to turn a news blog into something that looked more like a German tabloid magazine. For any design innovators, Skrenta's conclusion is uncomfortable, but salutary.

Our news pages didn't conform to any standard web page metaphor. Users instantly recognize — within 100 milliseconds — which class of site a page belong to — search result, retail browse, blog, newspaper, spam site, message board, etc. And if they don't recognize what kind of page they're on, they generally give up and hit the back button. [Rich Skrenta, Topix founder, on his personal blog]