Be a better blogger

For all of 2006, I took a completely different direction in blogging. Instead of blogging about my geeky business, I traveled for the whole year and wrote about nothing but travel and our experiences. I don’t really know what it means to “be a better blogger”, but I think there must be some positive impact of blogging about something new and different. I think a lot of us bloggers have a certain comfort zone – maybe it’s technology or cooking or movies. To some degree, I think we can hide behind those subjects and not expose our values or the things we wouldn’t want others to see. In my experience, travel blogging for a year forces that upon you. In traveling and blogging across so many countries, the real “you” has to show through from time to time. As scary as it can be, I think it makes you a better blogger because you are prepared to open up just a little bit more and show that you’re sometimes stupid, ugly and ignorant, just like everyone else.

Here’s our travel blog: http://www.theworldisnotflat.com

Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems (and a father of XML) presented at the Northern Voice blog conference. Here are his points on being a good blogger:

1. Write what you know. Everyone is an expert in a small number of things.
2. Listen. The mythology of blogging is about putting things into the world, but the other part of that is hearing the world- listening. Listen, then write. If you run out to the world with your message without listening, you have a good chance of being wrong.
3. Link often. You owe it to your readers to link to others. Doing lots of linking is likely the single best way to get readers.
4. Post often. Like many things, the way to get good is to practice, plus more posts means more readers.
5. Correct yourself. Bloggers are different when we’re wrong, we can undo the damage when we publish. We can react in a way that makes it better.
6. Generalize. Almost everything starts more general and moves to specific.
7. Flame judiciously. One of the things that gives conversation flavor is anger. He sees no reason not to share your feelings. Reasonable people never change the world.
8. Spell-check. The quality matters, though Marc Canter disagrees, so does Jeremy Wright.
9. Look good.
10. Balance hubris and humility- arrogance smells- it stinks and drives readers away.
11. Be Brief. It’s hard to write a short entry
12. Be intense. A cool, dispassionate narrow tone, almost never works.
13. Don’t tell secrets. The blogosphere is not a million writers, it’s a million listeners. If you post something secretive, people will know, like high school- except the web never forgets.
14. Don’t ruin your life. There are a lot of ways you can get in trouble. The question is, why is the media writing about people getting fired for blogging? Think they are worried?
15. Don’t blog on command. People shouldn’t be pushed to blog. The people that should blog will blog.
16. Late add: Be sincere
17. Late add: Never Lie
18. Late add: Write for pleasure

I’ve been at it for a couple of years now, yet I feel like I’m just getting started.

I have a couple of blogs, a personal and a professional one and I get some forms of feedback, mostly through comments, incoming links, etc. It’s never enough though.

I wonder sometimes what the ideal feedback would look like. I often say that authenticity is the key to good blogging- I am what I am, warts and all. If this is true, should a reader’s feedback alter my blogging? If I change my style based on feedback, is it less authentic? I dunno.