What Makes a Good Blog?

My latest "hobby" of late has been the "Next Blog" feature of blogger.com. When I need a moment to unwind, I wander over to a blog I know about (Wook's is my usual starting point), and click the Next Blog link to see another, normally random, blog and see if it is anything interesting.

Some of the blogs I wander to are mildly interesting. But I have to say that 99.4% of the blogs I wander past are crap. With a capital C.

Now, wait a second here, what the hell? How do I get to say what's crap and what's not? I mean, hell, this site could be the king of crap (or maybe the McQueen of crap). Aside from the fact that I don't care if this site is crap or not (my site, my thoughts, for me, not you), I figure if I immediately want to click someplace else, the site is crap.

So, I was saying, "99.4% of the sites are crap."

After a while I started wondering what made me stop to look at certain blogs, but skip right over all the other ones. Because some I'd actually read a few entries, and click around to a few pages, but others I wouldn't even wait to load the first page. So rather than going ADD on the blogs, I came up with these suggestions for making a good blog:

1. Engage the reader

   One of the really nice things about blogging for oneself is that you can put down your thoughts without really caring who is going to read it. If you have permissions on the site to hide the entries/pages you really care about, even better. But if people other than you are going to read the site, it better be engaging.

   Engagement can happen in several ways:

   You could tell me a story. Those are usually good. Tell me an entertaining story about the day, your life, your struggles. When you do, however, for the love of whatever god you think exists, vary your sentence structure! When you tell me about your day, use it to illustrate a point. What moral, insight, example does this story tell me?

   You can illustrate a point. Here's what happened to me, and all of this serves to illustrate this statement. Stories can work well as an introduction, but get to the point. "Bush is an idiot. Tree is a moron. Together, we've determined any plant with bark on its trunk is incapable of higher level thinking. Point made." Something like that.

   You can teach me a lesson. What can you tell me about MySQL, jazz music, Infinity cars, early Christianity, second order partial differential equations, MacOS applications, Java, baseball or cold fusion that I can't figure out with five minutes with Google? Tell me, and make it interesting.

   The worst thing you can do, however, is to tell me in the same sentence structure about your day cleaning the house. Or how depressed you are (and how you're not doing anything to help the problem - depression isn't the problem, not getting help is), or how angry with the world you are (like the world owes you anything, yeah, right). Neither I, nor 99.9999999999999999% of the world care about either of these things. I would venture to say if you're writing for the Internet®, none of your audience cares about the previous three things.

2. Stick to the point

   When an article starts out about deer pellets and ends up proving the speed of light can vary and the theory of relativity is inaccurate, I get frustrated. Were you talking about deer shit or physics? Pick one and stick to the point.

3. Don't use filler

   This works with the above one about sticking to the point. A story can be used to introduce a topic, that's fine. But don't make an entry longer than it needs to be. Similarly, include what you need.

4. Skip the cute l33t-sp34k

   And the text speak. Then learn to spell close to correct. The occasional misspelling isn't a big deal (everyone misspells a word here and there), but multiple gross misspellings are annoying. Oh, and if you can't take the time for the extra Y and O in "you," you should take typing lessons.

5. Write and post consistently

   Either use the tool or don't. Get hooked on it, or walk away. But posting once every two weeks, and apologizing for not posting? Don't do that. If every two weeks is your posting schedule, then it's your posting schedule. Very few people will read your post if it's not good. And fewer still will read if you're apologizing for not posting.

   Post like you mean it. (That's a good motto for life in general: "Live like you mean it.")

6. Lose the annoying graphics

   If your page takes more than 5 seconds to load all the images and music crap on your first page, I'm not waiting around for it. Next Blog, please!

You know, it's entirely possible I want entries and articles that are very similar to the five paragraph essays from high school ("Tell 'em what you're going to tell 'em. Tell 'em. Tell 'em what you told 'em.").

Or maybe the elements of writing are the same here as they are in print. If that's the case, then there are many references to far better guides for better writing. Maybe a google search is a good place to start...

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