Blogging etiquette. Some helpful tips for the aspiring blogger:
Don’t
- …steal posts or post ideas unless you can add to them in a significant way.
- …hold anything back. If you have people in the ‘real world’ reading your blog, tough. If you don’t want people knowing your inner mind, why’d you show them your site? Face it, when you show people your site you either want to boost your fan base or share something with them. And if you truly want to share something with them, why not make a page specifically for everyone? Write a suicide note (by the way, in researching this bullet point, I found my new favorite site. Check this out) and give them the link, or– better yet and less dramatically– make a decoy blog and let them read that (my decoy blog is Goosing the Antithesis :).
- …hold nothing back. Sometimes we really, honestly don’t care. A little venting is fine, but etiquette requires you be at least marginally conscious of your audience.
- …write when you have nothing to write.
- …write two words when one will do. Or make your posts excessively long. Or hammer through a point that people got in the first sentence. Also, make sure you absolutely never try to attack redundancy by being redundant. That joke is so old it tripped over its breast and broke its hip.
- …go crazy with backgrounds, frames, html, or anything else that puts form over function. A pretty blog is one thing, but sometimes it can get ridiculous.
- …do poetry… unless you’re good at it, have something to communicate with it, or are doing it as a lark.
- …be a SPAM blog or do the job of one by falling for a pyramid scheme.
- …edit posts without letting people know. (For instance, if someone catches you not doing your homework on ‘Chanukkah,’ comment with a “thanks Seth, fixed the thing,” instead of fixing it and commenting with a “sorry Seth, I think you’re imagining things, I see no factual errors in my post.”)
- …steal bandwidth.
Do
- …trackback to other people’s posts if trackback is supported.
- …comment where available when something is useful, entertaining, or thought-provoking.
- …read this post.
- …respond to your readers.
- …blog regularly.
- …try new ideas.
- …tell people about yourself.
- …blog about good things sometimes.
- …anger someone. If you usually find yourself agreeing with the general public, you’re both wrong. I like to have one arch-nemesis at any given time, but it’s been a while since I’ve found anyone who was truly my match… or who realized that they were my arch-nemesis :-þ
Sometimes Do and Sometimes Don’ts
- …be purely useful, entertaining, or thought-provoking.
- …intertwine your personal life with your blog. (Unless it’s a personal blog, in which case: assume nobody’s reading it because– unless they want you, are bored a lot, or want to hear your side of the story without having you specifically tell them– nobody is readingwhat you write.)
- …try radical new ideas.
- …smile while you post.
- …blog while angry or sad.