Justin Shattuck has a great post about the things blogs do that he finds annoying. It’s a good read and he points out a lot of good items.
- Link love, it makes sense
- Make your content accessible
- Wow, thats alot of ads
- Echos are getting old
- Admins, stop being lazy
- I know who I am
- Stop filling forms out for me
- Direct linking is stealing
- Snap sucks!
- So many images, dumb.
When trying to come up with the things that annoy me about blogs I kept coming across the same things. To many ads, to much spam and that echo chamber.
I’ve realized that a lot of these things can be fixed by reading only feeds. 99% of ads are not included in feeds and that’s a magnificent site. On the blogs themselves, I’d rather not block ads as I do find relevant ones helpful at times and I know sites have bills. What I’d rather see are ads that are designed into the content, not a big block of adsense in the middle of the post.
By reading a feed, you never see the comment spam. Course you don’t get to see the comments either. Spam plugins are not un-common, take some time to install and configure one to YOUR needs. If it doesn’t help, find a new one. The worst is when I see company blogs with ads for Viagra. If you can’t take the time to moderate that, then are you going to take the time to value me as a customer?
Unfortunately the echo chamber isn’t easy to filter out. However, if a blog does nothing but echo what someone else says, then I delete the feed. Goodbye.
I came up with two items of my own to add to the list. The first of which is off topic posting. I know that it’s hard to stay on the same topic 100% of the time, but if your blog is about your company, don’t start talking about your kids or pets. Special occasions, sure, but lets keep your personal life on your personal blog and your business in your business blog. That’s all I ask.
The second is over posting. I love the CrunchGear blog, but I can’t keep up with it. There are a handful of blogs I love, but they all get 10-30 new posts each a day. I can keep up with one or two high posting blogs maybe, but after that I’m spent. I’d rather see one or two posts a day or else I’ll just stop reading.
What is it about blogs that bug you?
