Friday, August 19, 2005

Simon World's 50 Rules for Bloggers

Excerpts, of course, chosen more for pith than soundness of advice. If you want good advice on blogging, read the whole thing, and the links at the end. Then follow it. Or not.
2. Never get your brother to guest blog for you. Trust me. [ed. You mean never get your brother...]
12. If you think this blogging caper is a path to fame and fortune, give up now.
13. It's not fair. It never was and never will be. Deal with it.
25. It's your site so you can do whatever the hell you like. [ed. Unless you're on Blogger]
32. Many bloggers adopt an alias or nom de plume. There are many reasons why this can be a good or bad decision. Just try and choose a good alias. The blogosphere already has several Tom Paines. As far as I know it doesn't yet have a King Kong. [ed. Damn, I coulda been a monkey!]
36. Logic and reason are for the weak. Knee-jerk and off-the-cuff reactions are for the blogger.
37. Blogs are the perfect diversion. They send you on more tangents than a calculus class. Just remember that when reading blogs time seems to go much faster than normal.
38. There is no great diversion than your own blog. You will spend hours getting the coding right, the format right, the content right, fixing links, trying to get readers, reading other blogs. You don't get paid for it. In fact blogging is the one game where the more successful you are the more it costs you (e.g. in bandwidth charges). It really is a sucker's game.
39. Blog is an ugly word but we're stuck with it. [ed. speak for yourself. I have a Web Journal. Yeah, it's on Blogger, why?]
42. The stupidest, most off-the-cuff posts tend to get the most comments.
43. A good way to get people to visit your site is to visit theirs. Blog owners check their referrer logs religiously and when they see a new URL in the logs, they go check it.
50. Ignore all the conflicting advice you get, including this.
(Note: Bold emphasis in original. No, I don't know why.)
The only original blogging advice I've ever come up with is here.

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