Amy Gahran provides a great service to bloggers by offering a seven part series on the types of blogs she has observed. (Thanks to Dina Mehta for pointing to this – I also get Amy’s RSS feed but had not yet reviewed it) This work is a good example of her type seven – a series post. I have listed the types and quoted her advantages and disadvantages below. Amy offers a lot more in her posts including good examples of each so I encourage you to check them out.
I have done types 2 through 7 in my blog and try to provide a mix of them. I think that too much of one type is limiting. I know as a blog reader that a steady diet of only one type is not as interesting, at least to me. I tend to do more of types three and five because I like to write.
I found that a series postings around a common theme seems to appear to readers. I did my first one as an experiment to cover my blog while I went on a vacation. Because of the positive response, I have done two others. One covered a move but I will continue to do them periodically even if there are not other reasons to do this.
Amy makes a very good point about the need to edit long work and series postings. Several of my efforts in these two longer spaces were revised versions of work I did earlier in print media so they had already gone through major editing. In these cases the original versions are no longer accessible or I would have linked to them. But I also did major updates to this material to make them new work. Other long pieces were trial versions of ideas I plan to expand at a later point.
In addition, I do all my posts in MS Word first so that I have the editing features of Word. Then I paste them into TypePad. This also gives me a backup of the content on my own hard drive so I am not completely dependent for storage on a hosted service that could go down.
Here are Amy’s types in her own words.
Type 1 Link-only posting, the blogger simply posts a link – perhaps with a few words of context. ADVANTAGES: Fast and Easy DISADVANTAGES: Looks Lazy, Hemorrhages Readers
Type 2 Link blurb posting, focuses on a link to another site or blog. However, the blogger adds significant value to the bare link by writing some original content or context. ADVANTAGES: Fairly Quick to Post and Read DISADVANTAGES: Reader Turnover
Type 3 -Brief remark, a blog posting that generally is just 1-3 short paragraphs long. ADVANTAGES: Short, content-rich, link-attracting DISADVANTAGES: More effort, potentially superficial or banal
Type 4 - List-format blog posting combines several short items into a single posting ADVANTAGES: Easy to Scan and Read, Allows Detail DISADVANTAGES: Readers May Miss Important Content
Type 5 - Short Articles – This nebulous category includes any blog posting that runs up to about 500-700 words long. ADVANTAGES: Fairly Quick Reading, Attracts Links, Enhances Reputation DISADVANTAGE: Deceptively Difficult to Write
Type 6 - The long article format includes almost any blog posting that runs longer than 700 words and that is not a list. ADVANTAGES: In-Depth, Enhances Reputation, Good for Storytelling DISADVANTAGE: Tedious + Rambling = Eye Glaze
Type 7 – A series of postings and her work here is a good example.
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