Weblog Philosophy
My friend Michael Duff has written an excellent piece called "Weblog Philosophy."
I hope it gets linked all over the web, because there's lots of good stuff in it and a lot of weblogs would be better if they incorporated some of his suggestions (disclosure: it even mentions yours truly, but I'm not engaged in shameless plugging here because I get some criticism).
One thing I find interesting is that most of the sites Michael likes have been coded by their authors. That used to be the norm, but there's been a trend among the warbloggers to pay professional designers to produce a blog template for them (usually Movable Type powered). They are always slickly done (one of the prominent designers of such political blogs is a friend of mine), but I'm certain many future clients would benefit from reading Michael's piece and really thinking through what they are trying to accomplish with their blog, and what sort of layout might best achieve those goals.
(Update) Oh, and I must get cereal tomorrow when I go to the grocery store. That Kashi high fiber/low sugar stuff. :)
(Update 2) A few thoughts of my own on weblog philosophy also. Like Michael, I used to keep a weblog of one-liners (he gave me the idea) that eventually morphed into Reductio ad Absurdum. And I appreciate that Michael's article wants more of the personal from bloggers, and less of the professional. But here's a suggestion -- some of the personal is the selection of stuff on Reductio. Sure, Michael and other smart people can go read NRO and TNR and OpinionJournal for analysis of politics and culture, and Google News even compiles it all for you in one spot. But most people don't go read all that stuff. They read blogs these days, instead. I WANT them to go read the really best stuff at least. And that's the personal part of Reductio, because I'm selecting the articles I think should be read. The selection is my personal comment: "this article should be read by libertarian-conservative-honest liberal types who are interested in politics, books, and culture (with a little Texas thrown in )." I just cheat, and don't say why. It's really not much different from the old one-line blog, except I'm not snarky. :)
While we're on the topic of personal blogging, I meant to link to these thoughts from Andrew on the topic ages ago, and forgot. I find this admission very interesting (and identify with it to a degree):
I quote others who are more composed. In most cases, the ones I quote are saying a healthy fraction of what I would say if I'd found the composure. I barely comment, I rarely even summarize. I let ambiguities stand, and I refuse to argue. All this serves two of my main purposes, to remember what I was thinking about and to get some small feel for how others (livejournalers) see the same data (my quote & paste posts).
[Posted at 18:57 CST on 10/12/02] [Link]
