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18 aspects of high quality blog content

18 Aspects of High Quality Blog Content

(1) Radiant: Immediate visual impression of credibility, authority, and propriety via color, design, typography, logo, and upfront corporate or personal identification.


(2) Relevant: Having an obvious pertinence, appropriateness, application, or affinity with the topic at hand. Not trying to be all things to all readers. Not wandering off into muliple tangents or side issues.


(3) Rare: Unique, idiosyncratic, not redundant, not commonly found, in this form, or with this degree of completeness, in other information resources.

Except in the case of strict "link blogs" (like Robot Wisdom), your personal commentary, analysis, or opinion is included to make your blog more interesting and appealing.


(4) Rich: Loads of good stuff for users to enjoy, absorb, and ponder, rather than meager, mediocre, same-o same-o offerings that aren't worth waiting for the site to download into the browser.


(5) Radical: Beyond platitudes, pleasantries and proverbs--provide your blog readers with fresh thinking that challenges pre-conceived, outmoded, or erroneous (but popular) notions.

Dare to be Different. Question both authority and anarchy. Challenge your own beliefs. Read contrary opinions, that contradict your point of view, to determine if there just might be some value in them.


(6) Rapacious: Investigating, exploring, accumulating, and stockpiling all the information that is known to be available on a topic.

Then differentiating what is useful and desired by the target audience, and providing summaries, paraphrases, quotations (with permission from the sources, where required), links, or other means of dissemination.


(7) Recrudescent ("breaking out afresh, renewed action"): Providing your blog readers with facts that are emerging in various locations and scenarios, but have largely gone unnoticed by other bloggers.


(8) Rectilinear ("characterized by straight lines"): Driving right to the heart of the matter, no lengthy digressions, irrelevant filler, or off-topic meandering.

Pointing your audience directly (via links, URLs) to the most authoritative, credible, or interesting material.


(9) Resolute: Firm in purpose, exhibiting confident clarity, and presented aggressively or creatively to be more memorable and persuasive.


(10) Recondite ("beyond ordinary perception, profound, dealing with complex or obscure subjects"): Sublime, extraordinary, "Eureka!" type insights that contain the solution for obstinate or pervasive problems.


(11) Repositorial: Your blog is considered to be a dependable repository, reservoir, or collection of all necessary facts or contains references to the major resources dealing with the subject, obviating the need for your readers to bounce all over the web, hunting down the relevant data.


(12) Realistic: Rational, pragmatic, capable of immediate application to actual situations, not overly theoretical, hypothetical, utopian, fanciful, or abstract.


(13) Reverberant ("to re-echo"): Your blog's content reflects your blogging goals and the needs of your audience. Be sure your goals and your audience's needs are clearly and comprehensively understood and defined.


(14) Refluent ("flowing back, as an ebbing tide"): Has links back to source or substantiating material.

If you mention other blogs, be sure to provide direct links to them. And if you refer to a specific post in another blog, or information at a web site, provide a "deep link" that takes the reader directly to that specific item.

"Shallow linking" that merely takes the reader to the main page of the other blog or web site can be very frustrating. Sometimes it is difficult to locate the information, especially if the other site has less than ideal information architecture, no site search, or poorly categorized archives.


(15) Refrangible ("can be refracted, bent, as light rays entering a glass"): The information in the blog is capable of being "tilted" toward differing conditions, flexible in implementation, not rigidly relevant to a severely limited range of applications.

For example, this list of aspects of good blog content can be relevant to personal blogs, CEO blogs, business blogs, academic blogs, military blogs, marketing blogs, just about any type of blog, wiki, or web site.


(16) Remonstrative ("pleading in protest or rational complaint, maintaining a reasonable opposition toward something"): As demanded by the situation, is not shy or timid about protesting what you consider, in good conscience, to be wrong, insincere, unethical, morally corrupt, unprofessional, or factually incorrect.


(17) Retrievable: Easily searchable via main body content heads and subdivisions, "site search" text entry box, and clearly and logically categorized archives.


(18) Responsive: Your blog, filled as it is with such great content that fulfills the above 17 criteria, is nonetheless still open to user-generated, client-mandated, or corporate-dictated corrections, elucidations, critiques, revisions, amplifications, alterations, and questions.

~~~ Keep it REAL.

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5 Ways to Promote a Blog

You've started a blog. It's exciting to post an article and publish it to the web. You learn a little HTML. You tweak some colors and upload photos and video files. You start embedding links in key phrases in your content. You jazz up your sidebar with widgets, graphic link badges, traffic monitors, and lists of your best posts.

You enjoy sharing your expertise, experiences, and insights. It's not hard for you to have something to say every few days. Everything's going great. You're a real blogger and your blog has passed beyond the amateur generic template, to gleam as a unique and special creation.

Now -- how do you get people to visit your blog?

You think you have some value to impart to others. You feel that people can benefit from your wisdom, humor, and skills. But how do you make your blog known? How do you attract traffic to it?

Here are 5 proven methods for effectively promoting your blog.


(1) Provide material that advertises it.

This may seem like a no-brainer, but many bloggers fail at this. If you're an individual, put your blog URL (web address) on your business cards. If you run a corporate blog, put your blog URL on business cards, stationary, print ads, pens, coffee mugs, wherever you promote your business, promote your blog too.

Are you inserting coupons, magazines, fliers, and ads in your bags when customers make a purchase? Then why not print a special insert that lists all your web presences? Include your ecommerce site, Twitter, blog, and any other social media sites that you're using.



(2) Post comments at other blogs.

It's called reciprocal commenting. You post a comment at a blog that's relevant to the topics you blog about. Chances are, if your comments are considered valuable and enriching to the content of that other blog, the blogger may reciprocate by posting a comment at your blog.

This used to be the norm years ago, but many bloggers have grown arrogant or lazy, so don't expect to receive equality. You may get one comment at your blog for every 5 to 10 you post at other blogs.



(3) Post new articles frequently.

As you publish more content that's relevant to your niche, search engines will rank you as an authority on the subjects you discuss. Your postings must be rich with naturally occurring keywords (not spamdexing: loading keywords in artificially in an attempt to game the system, which will backfire).



(4) Post links to your blog articles on Twitter.

Use Twitter as a way to promote individual articles that you publish on your blog. Don't just say "Check out my blog. It's loaded with great information on Topic X." Instead, in the midst of other messages, sprinkle in links to specific posts as you publish them, and to older posts that you're proud of and that may attract some attention. Say "my new post" then give the title ("How to Use an External Hard Drive") and the URL.



(5) Create videos, upload them to YouTube, and link to your blog.


Use a webcam or camcorder to make videos relevant to your audience and the topics you discuss on your blog.

If you're an individual, you can do videos of you simply discussing some topic you care about. If you run a business blog, do videos showing how products solve problems for customers, do a tutorial, have the CEO explain her or his vision for the company and what differentiates it from the competition, or have a store manager do a brief tour of the facilities.

Buy a home video studio program like Magix or Sony Vegas to add nice titles, effects, and other editing processes. Upload the videos to YouTube, then embed them in your blog posts. In the YouTube description of each video, start the description with a link to your blog, starting with http://

This will enable fans of your videos to visit your blog and enjoy more of your ideas and content.



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MILO Computer Simulation Person Interacts with Human

Watch Milo, a computer simulation person, interact with a human person and trick the human into believing the artificial realism.

Permanently DELETE Your Facebook Account

CAUTION: This article uses bad language, when quoting the founder of Facebook. I normally never use such words. I felt it was necessary in this case. I think my readers are mature enough to understand.

FILE UNDER: Deceptive Business Practices / User Retaliation.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg calls users "dumb fucks" for voluntarily submitting personal data on their accounts.

He happily exploits the users by changing the Facebook privacy policy -- without informing users of the change.

And by making it necessary to Opt Out, rather than Opt In. Sharing your personal data, in other words, is by default. You have to somehow know what's going on behind your back, then go change your account's settings to thwart the silent exploitation.

Since Facebook users often give out way too much personal data, like the town where they were born, their birthday date/month/year, their mother's maiden name, the name of their pet cat, etc., criminals can harvest that information, guess your passwords, and do other things to commit Identity Theft.

It's obvious now: to preserve User Rights & Dignity, you must Delete your Facebook account and spread negative buzz about Facebook on all your social networks.

Read:

* The Consumerist "We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever"

* Wall Street Journal "Looking to Delete Your Facebook Account? You're Not Alone"

* Rachel Levy "Am I Being Naive About Facebook?" (see my comments there)

* Business Insider's "10 Reasons to Delete Your Facebook Account"

* CNET Facebook backlash

* Gizmodo "Top 10 Reasons You Should Quit Facebook"

* ReadWriteWeb "Quit Facebook Day" website

* Gawker "Facebook's Great Betrayal"

* Ars Technica "Facebook Caught Sharing Secret User Data with Advertisers"

* INC. Magazine "Mark Zuckerberg's Privacy Settings"

* Wikipedia "List of Social Networking Sites"

* Diaspora, the anti-Facebook social network of NYU students

* AppStorm "6 Alternatives to Facebook"

* PC World "Kill Your Facebook Page".

The New York Times explains the ridiculous and abnormal Opt Out aspect of Facebook user privacy...which is called Instant Personalization, but is really Instant Exploitation.

Facebook's arrogant attitude toward users and their privacy is nothing new. Wired ran an article about Facebook privacy and backlash, back in December 2009. At that time, Facebook was being criticized for a rash of Facebook phishing attacks on users, as Fast Company reported.

At first, on Twitter, I called for a mutiny of Facebook users. I suggested that they change all the information in their profiles to mis-identify their interests, school, job, hometown, hobbies, age, sex, etc. This is called Data Scrambling, a form of blogocombat that I have perfected for extreme cases of corporate exploitation.

Then I recommended setting up multiple false accounts, to flood Facebook with bogus profiles of unreal people. My reasoning was that once advertisers heard that the Facebook user data was poisoned, they would refuse to advertise on Facebook.

Someone commenting on ReadWriteWeb has done that: he set up a false account with bad information. See Winston's comment #19 on the post "More Web Industry Leaders Quit Facebook".

Now my advice is to DELETE your Facebook account -- permanently.

Not "DEACTIVATE". That just makes your account dormant, while retaining all your personal data and keeping it available to advertisers who want to spam you or persuade you to buy their products.

Why fight deceptive business practices with deceptive user data? That would be imitating the oppressor. But deleting your account permanently, now that's a more noble and effective way to fight!

PERMANENTLY DELETE your Facebook account, and strike a blow against greed and arrogance.

If you don't need an explanation of Delete vs. Deactivate, and you're sure you want to permanently delete your Facebook account now, go to this link: Delete My Facebook Account.

Here's the HTML code of that link:

http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account


You must not log into your Facebook account for 14 days if you want to complete the delete process. I suggest you remove Facebook from your brower's bookmarks (favorites). If you accidentally log into your account, you'll Reactivate it, and have to start all over again.

Sign the MoveOn.org petition against Facebook invasions and exploitation of personal data.

Hey Zuckerberg!

Who's the dumb one now?






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