I’ve read hundreds (or thousands) of blog posts and articles about blogging.  One of the really timeless ones that I still come back to is a list of ten tips from Jorn Barger that were featured in Wired Magazine.  Barger is generally credited for having coined the term weblog, which we normally shorten to blog.  (this last sentence edited after a commentator corrected me, thanks)

His tips are definitely worth checking out.  As you go through them, you’ll probably note that changes in social media and the tools of blogging will make some of them seem a bit out of date.  When you read through Barger’s article, a lot of what he’s describing is about the best ways to link back to original content.  However, his ten points are definitely worth reflecting over, even if they don’t dwell much on content creation..

Barger’s Ten Tips

Here are the tips from Jorn’s Wired article, with my own thoughts added below each one:

1. A true weblog is a log of all the URLs you want to save or share. (So del.icio.us is actually better for blogging than blogger.com.)

This tip reveals the origins of blogging.  The weblog concept predated newer tools like social news, social bookmarking, and social browsing.  Barger’s point is well taken in terms of accuracy:  social bookmarking is a simpler tool that does what the original weblogs did.  Blogs have evolved over time to provide more narrative and original content and Barger points out that deviation from the concept’s origins.

2. You can certainly include links to your original thoughts, posted elsewhere … but if you have more original posts than links, you probably need to learn some humility.

I appreciate the sentiment behind this tip, but I don’t buy it.  The blogging platform is now a content management system – it’s a way to publish to the world.  It’s designed to let you publish original content.

One argument that I can buy is the following:   if you exclusively post your own content without acknowledging authoritative sources, you’re doing it wrong.  In some circles, it would be called plagiarism.  You’re trying to build authority without paying your dues if you continuously present information as fact without:

• proof
• showing your readers where you got your info.

I don’t think that the stipulation about “your original thoughts, posted elsewhere” needs to apply though:  many people don’t have an “elsewhere” to post their thoughts.

3. If you spend a little time searching before you post, you can probably find your idea well articulated elsewhere already.

This is so very true and it’s one of the most frustrating things about being a blogger or a writer in general.  There is nothing new under the sun, just variations on a theme.

Taken in context, Barger’s point is that it may make more sense to link to someone’s article than to write your own because it’s very likely that someone else did a better job than you can.

4. Being truly yourself is always hipper than suppressing a link just because it’s not trendy enough. Your readers need to get to know you.

This tip is pretty hard to detect; after all, you’ll never know for sure which links I thought about posting, but chose not to.

Barger’s right, though:  if you think a link is important, post it.  It doesn’t matter what the rest of the world thinks.  You don’t need to blindly follow the crowd and try to please them.

Barger himself is not necessarily a trendy or politically correct person to link to.  He has some political views that don’t mesh well with several prominent groups around the world.  Nonetheless, his advice is still good.  ’Nuff said.

5. You can always improve on the author’s own page title, when describing a link. (At least make sure your description is full enough that readers will recognize any pages they’ve already visited, without having to visit them again.)

Very good point.  There’s two pieces to this, too.  There’s the descriptive text about the content that you can create to help your reader understand what the content is about.

There’s also the anchor text (the text contained within the link as it appears on your webpage, like this link back to this very post).  The anchor text has the added value of working a bit of search engine magic when it’s done correctly.

Actually, there’s a third piece:  the headline.  Although you don’t control the original headline, you could use these guidelines to create your own spiffy anchor text back to the original content.

6. Always include some adjective describing your own reaction to the linked page (great, useful, imaginative, clever, etc.)

See my comments about point 5 above.  Barger seems to be writing from the point of view of scarce resources:  limits on the ability to publish descriptive text.

Today’s commonly used blogging platforms (including Wordpress, Blogger, and Moveable Type) allow easier, flexible types of web page management that are more similar to journaling software than the original weblogs, which started as customized web pages.

7. Credit the source that led you to it, so your readers have the option of “moving upstream.”

This is the most important piece of advice in Barger’s article, IMHO (In My Humble Opinion).  Respected bloggers like Jason Falls, Chris Brogan, Valeria Maltoni, Louis Gray, and anyone with at least an ounce of integrity realize that we should link back to the original source of content.  It’s also good to acknowledge someone who turned you on to something as well.

Here’s a very recent example that illustrates this point: Chris Higgins at Mental Floss posted an article with a link to a John Cleese video about the creative process.  I was surprised to see a paragraph at the bottom of the article that provided hat tips (acknowledgements) to Merlin Mann, Jay Cruz, and myself.

I contacted Chris to let him know where I found the video (Ewan McIntosh).  Chris then took the initiative to track the references back further to this blog and this blog (and who knows how Benjamin Ellis originally found the video) and to document them all.  That’s a whole lotta links.

The advantage of doing this kind of linking is two-fold:

a.  Giving credit where credit is due, which is always appreciated and builds good will.

b.  Exposing your readers to other cool blogs.

The benefits can be much greater than the ten minutes that it takes to create and publish these links.

8. Warn about “gotchas” — weird formatting, multipage stories, extra-long files, etc. Don’t camouflage the main link among unneeded (or poorly labeled) auxiliary links.

It’s a good practice to try to find the appropriate starting point if you’re trying to link back to a source that spreads over multiple web pages.  It’s good for your reader and for the original author.

I have noted that a number of people still put cautions in their posts for things like large file sizes, software and version compatibility, and so on.

9. Pick some favorite authors or celebrities and create a Google News Feed that tracks new mentions of them, so other fans can follow them via your weblog.

This isn’t just limited to Google News Feeds:  many social media websites, including Twitter, FriendFeed, Delicious, etc. have easy to use widgets to share the content and links that you publish via your activity.

I’ve chosen to use the FriendFeed widget on Broadcasting Brain because it combines activity from several social media accounts into a single stream.  It’s less automated than a Google News feed, but it provides a similar function.

10. Re-post your favorite links from time to time, for people who missed them the first time.

I do this from time to time, though it’s mostly links to my own content.  I think this is a good idea, though:  your audience can change daily, weekly, monthly and I don’t think it’s wrong to put new pointers to old content on occasion.  I’ve been doing it more and more lately; see this example of  a Remembrance Day post.

And, of course, this very post is a good example of that.  I’ve linked to Barger’s article before in different places, but never in this blog.  So now I’m taking the opportunity to show it to you here, especially for your benefit if you’ve never read it before.

In Conclusion

Looking at these tips, two years after they were written, I find that some of the underlying logic behind them doesn’t apply, especially the reasons driven by technical limitations.   However, the essence and key lesson in each tip is still valuable to all bloggers and social media users.

What do you think?  Does Barger’s article still make sense two years after it was written, twelve years after the term blog was coined?

Image by Robert Sanzalone

Other posts that you might enjoy reading:

• The best bloggers are world builders
• Thoughts from Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer
• Reader Recommendation Friday
• A new blogging resource – The Blogging Lens
• The role of the Twitter follower