

If you hate all of the unoriginal design blogs, this post is for you - briancray
http://briancray.com/2009/08/12/5-great-examples-of-popular-blog-posts-that-you-should-know/
This is a mock post. While there is a place for all of these posts, I’m trying to make a point that original blogs are being shut out by formulaic blogs.
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aw3c2
6\. Pretend you are better than your competition and mock them.

Check out the posts on that site <http://briancray.com/blog/> How is he any
better?

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briancray
I figured someone would point that out. And here's my response:

If you look at all of those posts, they are my original opinion. I'm not
simply collecting links and saying "Here it is." That's the difference.

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evdawg
But you ARE just collecting links and saying "here they are".

<http://briancray.com/2009/06/13/5-web-tools-user-experience/> Just a link
with a "sign up for free" blurb.

<http://briancray.com/2009/05/04/5-books-web-professionals/> Two sentence
synopsis' with a link to Amazon.

[http://briancray.com/2009/07/27/eye-tracking-studies-
influen...](http://briancray.com/2009/07/27/eye-tracking-studies-influence-
redesign/) Two sentence synopsis' with a link to the REAL content.

The REAL irony is the title of _this_ post: "5 great examples of popular blog
posts that you should know". It falls EXACTLY into your group of "XXX (the
more the merrier) great examples of objects being rounded up with unique
common characteristic".

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indiejade
There is a huge difference between collecting links to say "here they are --
look at me!" and collecting links to say "hey! look at the content of this
link!". Most of the former start with a number -- hence the 5, 10, 20 ego-
camp. Most of the latter tend to contain interesting content.

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Jem
I agreed with the post right up until the bit about "..unless you're Smashing
Magazine".

Smashing Magazine only gained their popularity by regurgitating other people's
shit - they're no better than the rest.

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embeddedradical
higher quality regurgitation. i see smashing magazine as a quality filtering
aggregation subscription with occasionally good original content, and i see
things like a list apart and alertbox as consistent high quality original
content.

thing is, some good stuff makes it to the places that can't be relied on to
perpetually produce high quality content, and places like smashing help point
out where it is.

for me, hacker news is another filter subscription for the internet which also
occasionally has great original content right here. i remember seeing some
posts here earlier in the week saying this was a social site....maybe for
some, but for me it's a high quality subscription to the internet in general,
which replaced previous lower quality filters like reddit.

~~~
Jem
I guess that's a matter of opinion - I see a LOT of tat on SM.

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anigbrowl
Perhaps the takeaway here is that one of the top marketing blog commandments -
Thou Shalt Post Something Every Day - is slavishly obeyed by so many that we
are awash in trite content of little real value.

Arguably, this was the case long before blogs came along, as evidenced by a
look at the magazine rack of any supermarket, but the internet has certainly
exacerbated that. Indeed, the whole reason for sites like Metafilter or even
HN is that they consistently perform dual functions of content discovery and
crap filtration which are beyond the capability of most individual editors.
Few are given the capacity to be both prolific and consistently profound.

tl;dr the more frequent your blog posts, the less impact they make.

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jsankey
The simple fact is that as long as such posts attract hits, people will keep
writing them. Better to just ignore them and focus on creating and consuming
good content. It could be time to start filtering my RSS feeds to remove any
entries that start with a number...

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nkohari
More than unoriginal blogs, I hate blogs that have a list of a billion ads
across the top -- particularly when more than half of them are empty squares
that just say "advertise here." If you can't sell ad spots, at least don't
show them to me.

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briancray
Yea. luckily I only have 7.

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aaronz3
5 things you can do to come up with original content for your blog.

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onreact-com
In most cases and for most occasions there are enough resources out there. So
why write something "new" when you can just link 10 or more of such articles?
If you don't have anything to add, compile a list instead of just repeating.

~~~
briancray
I'd say if you're just a list compiler, you shouldn't be blogging. And what
are you saying? onreact.com isn't guilt of any of these blogging sins? :)

