Blogs buzzed this week with a headline that sent high school English teachers everywhere running in horror: Passive Voice is Redeemed for Web Headings.

Usability super-guru Jakob Nielsen's claim isn't actually quite as incendiary as you might think: He just backs up a somewhat accepted sentiment that passive voice is ok when it's necessary to bring keywords to the front of a headline with sexy eyetracking research showing that web readers, fanatically scanning the thousands of unread items in their RSS readers or whatnot, often read only the first two words of a paragraph.

Active voice automaton I may be, but even I can get behind the occasional passive construction of absolutely necessary for grabbing readers' attention. Unfortunately, though, I'm not convinced by either of Jakob's primary examples.

First off, the in-text example:

13 design guidelines for tab controls are all followed by Yahoo Finance, but usability suffers due to AJAX overkill and difficult customization.

According to Jakob, the words "design guidelines" carry the most weight in this sentence, and "13″ is short enough to not count in the "first two" rule of thumb.

So why not make 13 design guidelines the subject rather than the object?

13 design guidelines for tab controls make Yahoo Finance easy to navigate, but usability suffers due to AJAX overkill and difficult customization.

And activating the construction of that the-medium-is-the-message headline of Jakob's piece is even easier:

Passive Voice Works Best for Web Headings

…or does it?

Today, in honor of web zen's recognition of the inherent awesomeness of vintage cookie monster clips (which I had to frantically update, since most of the videos I originally embedded had since been yanked from YouTube), I bring you a very silly "I'm a {inanimate object}" personality quiz [via back in skinny jeans]:

Mmmm. Tasty.

I also bring good news to my (countless!) RSS readers: I'm slowly weaning myself off that ol' quixotic dream of being a real, bad-ass link blogger. First, I turned off automated del.icio.us posting, now, I've finally removed that link splicing from my feed as well.

If you really want to know what I'm bookmarking—and how could you not?!?!—there's always the del.icio.us RSS feed.

screenshot of my Google Reader bringing me the hilarious October 10, 2007 installment of xkcd

Gentle reader, if you've been with kenspecke since its inception, you'll remember that when Google Reader first arrived on the scene in October 2005, I was hopelessly smitten, then dismayed to find that I couldn't select which blogs to read via my painfully constructed hierarchy, as imported from bloglines.

The disappointment was so sudden and crushing that I didn't even bother to check out the second release of GR around this time last year—until now!

Well, my baby's back, with users' folderization appropriately prioritized. Ok, fine, Google likes to think it's tagging, but you know we're really talking about folders here. But the clinching factor in my renewed GR passion is the fact that new posts won't be marked as read until you scroll past them.

I know, I know, this is old news for everyone else this side of a continuously lit-up monitor, but I literally have been ignoring all GR news since my initial disappointment and I'm still glowing with anticipation about how much more reading I'll get done now that I don't have to worry about whether or not I have time to read all 318 new items in a feed before clicking on it. You really have no idea how many times an evening I look longingly at the bold, three-digit numbers by my feeds in bloglines but decide against starting to read because (que comic irony) I don't want to miss anything.

The only thing GR is missing now is one-step search feed subscription. I still kind of resent the fact that the unsurpassed dominator of the search engine market forces me to leave its RSS aggregator to get the path to a blogsearch feed and manually subscribe instead of seamlessly incorporating blogsearch subscription.

Oh, and yes, to you nay-sayers, I did have some difficulty in clearing out my previously imported subscriptions before importing my new OPML file. The mass unsubscription process is a little buggy.