[ranking blogs] 10 new criteria for assessing a great weblog

10 Criteria of Great Blogs

As Iain Dale explained about his system: I marked each blog out of ten on the following 10 areas: design; frequency of posting; writing ability; personality; comment; humour; range; interaction; popularity; independence of thought. This generated a mark out of 100.

James Higham uses 9 of these, sometimes combined, adds a few others and posits these as the criteria of a great blog:

1] fearless independence of thought and the ability to come out with new ideas and new perspectives on a more or less regular basis, in a spirit of genuine enquiry, unfettered by dogma, party line, prejudice or one issue obsession e.g. the 4th player, managerialism or flat rate tax; the ability to attack both sides equally and the opposite – to praise both sides equally;

2] enormous range of inclusion – either every possible aspect and ramification in a one issue blog or global scope in the issues covered in most fields, the only criteria being whether they are a] important b] interesting;

3] sheer writing ability – the ability to string words and phrases together with hardly an error [or typo], the blogger clearly educated at a reasonably high level in the language he or she was born into;

4] authority behind the writing – bona fides based on obvious [to the reader] ability in the field, life experience, a wide range of reading about the topic but not on formal qualifications or position;

5] personality & humour – this also includes ‘niceness’ or the ability to attack targets tongue in cheek, with dignity and wry humour. Quirkiness is not essential but it’s a sign the writer doesn’t take himself or his position too seriously;

6] innovative blog design as a reader service – not only pretty headers and nice colours but providing one touch information in the sidebars, accessible to readers - treating the blog as a service to the reader, rather than as a forum for one’s own opinions;

7] major works of substance from time to time – a blogger must display his bona fides by producing something substantial in fine detail, academically sound and capable of defence. This doesn’t necessarily mean a tome but does mean a long piece from time to time, on a worthy subject. This then needs to be followed through and the theme will appear in subsequent posts.

8] frequency of posting and consistency of identifiable style – maintaining the service with no huge experimental changes and giving the reader what he or she comes for over and over and over;

9] willingness to tweak - constantly working to improve everything from layout to comment, never resting on one’s laurels and saying ‘here’s my package – take it or leave it’ but rather listening, reading, learning and most importantly, growing as a blogger. A smug blog is a dead blog;

10] interaction with other bloggers and readers, comment of value on the issues of the day, mutual support e.g. this tagging business, e-mailing and well – interaction overall.

I’ve left ‘popularity’ off the list because I see it as a consequence rather than a criterion. If one takes care of the 10 criteria above, I feel popularity will come and I worry awfully about bloggers who are in it just for the stats. Mea culpa and the interesting thing is – once I stopped worrying [now I might view the stats once a day and sometimes not even that] and started concentrating on the product, the stats improved markedly anyway.

In the next post on this theme, I’ll list some of the best blogs going at this time, in my humble opinion.

Update: Tiberius Gracchus, in his Ten-Meme-Never list, has done a similar sort of thing to this.