Everybody now has a blog. Even people who don’t want one have one. Even people who don’t need one have one. Even people who don’t know they have one have one. Blogs are to the 2000’s what ISP-provided home pages were to the 1990’s. And here’s yet another post on yet another blog, blogging about blogging.

As long as we’re all going to do this, let’s do it right.

1. No diaries! Nobody who is interesting enough to have a diary blog starts one.

2. No cat posts! The cats are *this* close to taking over, and you want to help their plan to conquer the world by posting about your cat so the other cats sitting in their web-surfing owners’ laps can read about them?

3. No posts consisting entirely of links to funny YouTube videos! Seriously, we know where YouTube is, and we definitely already saw the video anyway when Boing Boing, Digg, and Reddit linked to it.

4. Your comment section is not the place to make a stand for the First Amendment! Trolls posting flames will continue to be trolls posting flames as long as wussy liberal bloggers coddle them and say “Everybody has a right to their opinion” - as if “F*** U, u r teh SUX0R!” were an opinion.

5. Your comment section is not your private Fascist Regime! Irritated posters will continue to be irritable until you learn to live with *some* criticism, since it’s a big Internet and you can’t have all of it love you all the time - especially if you’re an authoritarian conservative blogger ruling your webspace with an iron fist.

6. There is too a rule six! It has a number, doesn’t it?

7. When you can’t think of an idea for a post, just don’t post! “Sorry I haven’t posted for a while” is not an idea for a post.

8. Less sales, more production! It is useless to try to optimize a site for search engines, promote it to blog lists, invite all your friends to see it, try to get it to the top of Digg, initiate link-swapping deals, and try to boost its value on Blogshares when IT IS COMPLETELY EMPTY!

9. Blogging is not cool! Blogging is becoming like folk music was in the sixties; a powerful tool for uniting the people’s voice, a stirring tribute to the new voice of a young generation, a valuable means to change the world, and all of the above discarded in favor of doing it so you can wear the button on your T-shirt and hopefully score at parties.

10. Don’t blog top-ten lists! It’s a shamefully obvious ploy to pull in click traffic.

Related Posts:

• Firefox Extensions - ScribeFire
• That’s Us Bloggers: Taking Ourselves Too Seriously!
• Free USB Humping Dog
• The Great Digg Revolt of 2007
• 10 Things You Can Learn About Blogging From Monty Python

---