No, not those three little words. These three: frequency, brevity, personality. For my blogging assignment this week, I googled “what makes a good blog”. References to these three words spoken by the creator of Blogger, Evan Williams, showed up in more than one result.
As I reviewed several of the “successful” blogs listed for our assignment, I kept these three words in mind. I quickly skimmed through seven of the blogs listed because I am a skimmer, not a reader. As such I realized immediately that the blogs that were most attractive to me right off the bat were the ones that were obviously short and succinct, concise bite-size chunks often no longer than two or three paragraphs (librarian.net; Tame The Web, Seth Godin’s Blog). Regardless of content, I might be inclined to view any of these simply based on their brevity.
Kudos also to ReadWriteWeb and Gizmodo for their cool use of graphics and videos. As I am a skimmer, I do appreciate interesting visual aids.
In terms of frequency, I appreciated that all seven blogs were updated regularly by their authors, the most impressive with multiple daily posts (ReadWriteWeb, Tame The Web).
As far as personality, I’m not sure I could comment on that at this point without reading (not skimming) more of each of these blogs. But based on the brevity and visual attractiveness alone of the aforementioned five blogs, I’d be interested in following all of them in the future to get to know their “personality” better.
