CT Biz Blogs

I run across plenty of writing advice on the web. This article from the Lifehacker blog contains a lot of tips, summed up nicely. For example, this about titles, a little-understood but important part of your blog:

Use explicit titles and subject lines.

Summarize your message clearly and succinctly in the title of your post or the subject line of your e-mail message. Avoid sarcasm, generalities, metaphors, and in-jokes. For example, a too-general post title might be “Save money.” A more specific post title would be “Save Money: Clip coupons at Coupons.com.”

This has already made an impact on my writing. I was going to combine the three blog articles I’m writing about today into one post with the title “Blog trends and articles of note.” Well, that tells you something, but maybe not enough. How would you find the info again, if you want to come back to this article in a few weeks? So I’m writing three shorter posts, not to make it look like I’m writing three times as much, but because that makes this blog more useful to you. (It also helps the search engines — I’ll write about how and why that’s important at a later date). Of course, that means I now need three meaningful and keyword-friendly titles.

But that leaves me with the opening line I came up with for the longer article I started with. There’s no good place for that, so I’m going to put it here.

I cover the blogosphere so you don’t have to!

Achenblog, Joel Achenbach’s blog (he’s a journalist for the Washington Post), is fascinating for two reasons. First, it’s usually an amusing read, and second, the comments to the posts show how invested his readers have become in following his writing. For example, look at the comments to his latest post (at this writing) satirizing To Do lists (links to comments, scroll up to read the post).

When readers leave comments on most blogs, the comments are usually about that particular post — people weighing in with additional information, questions, corrections, opinions. But the comments on some posts here read almost like they’re from discussion forums, with regular readers referring to comments made by other readers in past posts.

The conversation weaves in and out of the posts and comments, and swirls around the various personalities who now know each other, online at least.

I found this via Business Week’s Blogspotting blog.

Teen bloggers: A new Pew Internet & American Life Project study was released, which talks about the online activity of teens. In the summary, they state:

Teens are often much more enthusiastic authors and readers of blogs than their adult counterparts. Teen bloggers, led by older girls, are a major part of this tech-savvy cohort. Teen bloggers are more fervent internet users than non-bloggers and have more experience with almost every online activity in the survey.

Why would this be important to you? Well, if you have a business where this group is your clientele (clothes, shoes, or books, to name a few) or if you want to increase your appeal to this group — you should be blogging!

(Thanks to Jim Turner’s One By One blog for the “heads up.”)