SharePoint Joel's SharePoint Land

After the time I spent on the 100 top blogs, I had some people come back and ask if I could go into what a good blog is and what a good blog post is. 

 

With my more recent post on blogging etiquite I went a bit into what not to do, but I didn't really cover What To Do.  Note these are my definitions and not something I took from any consortium.

 

 

 

A good blog follows some type of scope.  The better the blog the better defined the niche or focus area.  A personal blog may have exceptions to this, but your readers will give you feedback if you get too far off.  Ever been on a blog that was all over the place?  I don't subscribe to those, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.  A blog that is focused on a single topic and sticks with it has a lot of value.  I'd say don't be afraid of having a personality and even closing the line a little bit to let that personality shine through.  I love seeing a little bit of attitude rather than blaize or boring techwriter content. 

 

 

If you're saying the same thing as everyone else, the value add is insignifant.  The best blogs have unique content.  When someone starts quoting large portions of other blogs and barely gives credit, I get upset.  Now they are stealing search results and page views from the author.  Someone saying, "hey I read this cool post on X and I liked it because of ...." that's ok, but make sure you're adding the why or providing a collection of links that otherwise isn't available is fine as well.  Your blogging peers will still be looking for value add and not just links, but there is still a space for links.  There are some examples of like Big List and SharePointPedia serves this purpose, so I don't think we need too much more of this.  New or unique content is what we need.

 

 

When you learn something that's going to be value add.  Not everything is a best practice, but lessons learned and how you arrived at a decision is huge value add.  Prescriptive guidance and how you arrived at decisions around whatever is really going to help your peers and will definitely set your blog apart.

 

 

My experience is such that 2-3 or if you can get something out every work day is in the sweet spot, but if you're starting out you may consider starting higher after you figure out what has value.  I do have to say that there are some blogs that get posts once or twice a month that have incredible content that's better than anything that could be done on a daily basis and I'm a fan of that as well.  From a subscription numbers perspective if I post a lot, I could see a drop off.  People ultimately are looking for quality and not quantity for quantity sake.  The most frequent popular SharePoint blogger is Mike Gannotti, he's impressive at 10+ posts per week.  I'm sure blogging and tweeting has become part of his rythm.  I'm sure blogging for Mike is something as regular as breakfast (actually I'm sure it's more like lunch, something he's not going to forget, or it will feel wrong to miss it.)  That essentially is what I've found as well.  For me it's a topic in my head or some lesson learned that I want to get on paper (essentially... I can't think of a better digital equivalent).  I use to hate documenting with a passion, I guess in some cases I still do.  I find I can remember things really well especially when it comes to SharePoint, but I have found value in my own blogs for my own selfish reasons, especially collections of links/resources, charts and workarounds.

 

There was a survey done on "Business Blogs" on frequency with some interesting results.  Look at my top 100 SharePoint blogs post and look at the top 10 or 20 at frequency and you'll see a big variety from 10+ to .5.  We all appreciate the quality of Heather Solomon's blogs... they are very thought through.

 

Try to be consistent if you can, don't worry about posting over vacation, but consistency is what will ensure people don't abandon your blog as dead.