Greetings and Salutations,
I have received the numbers of votes, and tallied them up, and our schedule for the following few weeks will be the post today, followed by wikis, hacking, pictures, and general failing. Again, if you come up with any new ideas, if I think of any also, then they will be added onto the end. Thanks again for all the votes, it was very helpful in determining this, though I might use this for a different type of post in the future.... be on the lookout for a special series of posts starting this Saturday. Onwards to the remainder of the post!
Today, for those with sub-Sherlock Holmes powers of observation, I provide to you the post on blogging, and how to be polite therein. This is quite an undertaking for a blog, as while I write I am judged to see how good the blog is, and in the end, there will probably be comments about how I left out whatever I perform poorly at so as to look better, but I will continue to do this nonetheless. With any type of blog, no matter the subject or genre or style, there are a few rules that must be followed. As problogger.net, a weblog done by a professional blogger for about 9 years now, says, there are really five main ideals that need to be held for a blog to generally be considered a "great blog."
The first main point they have is that a blog needs transparency, it needs to be true and it needs to simply show its motivations, authors, partners etc. Frankly, if I was reading a blog and no matter how much I liked it, if it talking about Microsoft Office all the time in every one of it's posts and it was a blog about sports, I would not continue reading. Basically, what some blogs will do to get more money besides the standard, acceptable, ads, is they will sell portions of their posts to devote to a business. This is wrong, on this blog and on most other blogs people will occasionally state that some things are better than others, if it is a continuing topic they might repeat it for the duration of the topic, but never will we here at The Consortium stoop to taking money and any other false dealing.
The second point they have is that a blog needs Authenticity, or a real and unique experience. This is probably the most obvious one, because if a blog provides fake information, unless it is attempting humor, or if it covers the same topics or reproduced topics from other blogs, then nobody wants to read it. Likewise, a blog should generally be personal, not this secondary separate part of you that is completely different to yourself ad does not accurately represent your writing style and personality, because that is where your uniqueness comes through a lot of the time.
The third point is a touchy one for some blog authors, as it refers to integrity. I will not talk about this one much because integrity changes between bloggers, and can refer to both dishonesty and honesty, internal fighting and peace, a calm composure and a fighting one, severe rebukes and serene acceptances, and many other things. When a blog compromises it's own integrity for the sake of something else then it has already lost.
The fourth and fifth points are passion and engagement respectively. I put them together here because I believe them to be linked. To write a successful post you must be passionate about what you are writing and actually want to be a part of this, or else it comes out bored. A fellow blogger from TBCRH, The Professor of the Blog, never used a schedule, and I still remember how all of his posts were passionate and influential, he got some of the most comments because of it. With engagement, you really have to remember to post, and comment and reply to emails and more, which if you are passionate about the blog you are doing you will succeed at usually.
While these are great points, as it is a blog it can sometimes be biased, in addition any citation should be followed by more information to back it up, so as to prove that it is not a singular point of view. So for that we turn to Inc., a business magazine founded in 1979 for private businesses and then added on an internet section when internet usage became prevalent. It tends to point out in it's article on blog rules many of the same things as problogger.net does.
One of its' first points is to be transparent and use "a certain amount of candor." Their next two points also overlap with the fourth and fifth points from problogger.net, and they states that it should be updated often as information grows old quickly on the internet and that you should be as interactive as possible with visitors and members. The final one is very important and somewhat parallels the third post from problogger.net, in that it talks not quite about integrity, but staying cool when others are angry, and when you don't quite agree with what people say or think.
Let's look at one more site, a collaborative community organization for scholarly communication: crossref.org, which hosts an open blog basically for standard intellectual communication. They provide a set of strict rules for the blog, asking only for a certain kind of post, and banning any of another kind of post. Some of the things they ban are: "any defamatory, libelous, vulgar, obscene, abusive, profane, threatening, hateful, racially, ethnically, or otherwise offensive or illegal information or material" as well as a full two hundred and seven words more of things not allowed. Obviously this a very extreme case, as it is an incorporated non profit blog, rather than the style of blog hosted by wordpress.com or blogger.com.
Many other blogs don't follow these rules at all and actually are still successful, but they are not targeting the same crowd, but are targeting people more like trolls. In addition, while everything I said above is really a good idea and can be considered a basis for a good blog, but going back to problogger.net, they posted another, somewhat hypocritical, though understandable post much later. In this post they state that although there are many good basic ideas that can be considered rules, the beauty of a blog is that there are really no rules, well, besides standard internet rules.
And with that final thought, I close. Thanks as usual for listening or not, comment if you desire, or not. The rules are being compiled as it goes and will be ready by the end for the final post. If you have any questions, please feel free to comment or email us at our new address. If you want to make accusations or have any general complaints or see any errors, whether small grammatical errors or large continuity ones, please feel free to let us know.
Farewell and Valedictions,
Eoin Anndra Davis
(Tony Hung, problogger.net <http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/01/09/the-rules-behind-creating-a-great-blog/>)
(Jory Des Jardins, Inc. <http://www.inc.com/magazine/20051101/handson-technology-sidebar.html>)
(Crossref.org <http://www.crossref.org/CrossTech/docs/Blog_terms_1_0.htm>)
(Darren Rowse, problogger.net <http://www.problogger.net/archives/2011/03/08/the-11-definitive-rules-of-blogging/>)
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