How to evaluate a blog?
There should be clear cut yardstick for evaluating how good or bad a blog is, just as there are clear cut yardsticks for assessing the worth of a literary work, a film, a painting or a building.
Unless such a yardstick is place, there is bound to be anarchy in blogosphere.
Bloggers need to think about this and come up with measures to evaluate a blog.
Recently indiblogger has started a scheme for celebrating one blog a day. For this too a kind of yardstick will be immensely relevant for properly implementing this scheme, otherwise, their decision about blogs will be highly subjective and open to dispute.
Thinking quickly on this issue, I put forward here some criteria that come to mind which could be used to judge blogs, but more thought will be required. Do join in:
- aesthetics - the colour scheme, font aesthetics - type of font, size, colour, letter spacing, clarity, etc., layout - line spacing, spacing between paras, white spaces, the use of visuals, widgets, etc., to break visual monotinity, the overall impression on the eye of the page.
- writing - crispness of writing, grammatical correctness, elegance in writing, spelling errors, etc.
- content - relevance, utility, beauty of the content (such as in poetry or essay), originality, purposefulness, possibility of translating it into real action, clarity in the mind of the blogger about the purpose of his blog, internal cohesiveness of the various posts in the blog, whether the blog is focussed on one topic, etc.
- technical - navigational ease, page size, application of SEO techniques, smart or new technical features such as interesting widgets, code, etc.
- language - whether the language choice - Hindi, English, Tamil, Malayalam, etc., is appropriate to the target audience, whether it is a bilingual or multi-lingual blog etc.
- add more....
I guess I'm at a bit of a loss here because I don't have a "higher" purpose of trying to get blogging to "take off" in India. It doesn't matter to me one bit whether blogging "takes off" in India or not. That's not why I blog so I suppose this bit doesn't apply to me.
Prashant, I just thought of one thing which I forgot to mention in my earlier post.
When the Congress party was formed two centuries ago by the British agent Humes, its purpose was basically espionage - to understand what the Indian leaders were thinking and planning so that the British could checkmate and prempt them.
But Gandhi changed all that and used the party system to mobilise people and throw the British back to where they came from.
This analogy is very applicable to blogs. Blogs did start as a personal journal, and many blogs are still just that, but, just like the party, blogs in the right hands can achieve much more than just providing comfort to individual bloggers.
Rating is a mechanism that can help blogs to attain this potential.
oo.......oo...wow......... superb deiscussion....... I thought I m d only literati surviving in this world 
U both made gr8 comments n I agree with both of u.. Actually this reminded me of d debate n discussion I & my friend used to indulge in approx 4 yrs ago...
Well not every1 is a master in literature.... Ranking blogs is nice culture prevailing in our indiblogger community..
Ranking should be done focussing on every aspect based on overall performance of a blogger and his blog:
1. Writing capabilities - Look for his creativity in writing
2. Content quality - Look for the relevance in his content as per d niche of d blog
3. Frequency of Posts - How dedicated he is to keep d wheel of blogging rolling
4. Search engine ranking - How smart he is with SEO
5. Traffic - How does he manages to get gr8 traffic
6. Commercial value - Can he fill his pocket or does his blog yeild commercial return ?
7. No. of reaction or Comments: Look how loyal his readers are or Does his blog compete enough to involve his readers actively...
Scores should be awarded on each of d above factors and accordingly ranked on the totals if we want a blog and a blogger with d best of d best in every aspect....
Welcome SaurabhStar to this discussion.
Your suggestions are very constructive.
There are several questions I had asked earlier, on which you might have an opinion. Here are some:-
1. Given that blogs is all shapes and sizes would a single rating system for all (based on the one size fits all concept) work for blogs, or should be first categorise blogs into sub categories and devise rating mechanisms for each category. There could of course be both - an overall rating based on general features of blogs and a special rating that takes into account specific features of different types of blogs.
Here are some highly special forms of blogs that immediately comes to mind:-
- personal blogs
- tech blogs
- do-goodder type of blogs
- group blogs
- monetised blogs (the adsense fanatics)
- etc.
2. Prashant has repeatedly raised the valid concern of rating turing into some kind of thought policing. How can we avoid this pitfall?
3. Under whose aegis will this rating system function?
Can we have your views on these Saurabh (and others too)?
LOL... I didn't really compare Mr. Huxley to Chetan Bhagat... my point was that everything is not numeric. I don't think creativity can be quantified in absolute terms. There are too many variables!
In my opinion, one should visit blogs that one finds interesting, write about them, talk about them, and ignore the rest, unless of course, they are offensive/vulgar.
I am 100% with you. I fail to see any point in trying to rate blogs for the ease of viewers and to rate blogs so that "blogging takes off in India." The Internet is well cluttered already. to wake up in 2009 and try to clean it up is beyond futile...
~Prashant.
@ balsubramanyam, i just take a quick look on ur blogs... Ur loyalty to hindi language is of course aprreciable But let me advise u on one thing, u write english very well, why don't u start a blog educating people abt d same : hindi to english....
For ur 1st point : Ya Such categories should be made but still ranking of d top blogs in each category should be done on d same 7 or such factors mentioned in my previous post...
Ranking by categorization would help new bloggers to observe n analyse d top blog of specific niche n category and learn from them .......
For ur 2nd point : If a person is true blogger, he would learn from ranking system.. I would once again repeat my previous line: Ranking by categorization would help other bloggers to observe n analyse d top blog of specific niche n category and learn from them or if they don't want to go by system, they want to do zara hatke, den they can but strategy n promotional presentation matters a lot in such cases...
For ur 3rd point : Its as simple .. On a tv show such as dance or singing competition, top players dominating that very particular field guide........ Same goes here...... Top bloggers with experience should be recruited in this process...
Hi Saurabh, goog suggestions.
You seem to endorse the dual rating that I had proposed earlier - one overall rating of blogs on general blogging principles, and another rating based on criteria specific to the different blogging categories.
Your second point is also valid. Genuine bloggers would welcome a ranking system as it would recognize good blogging practices, and genuine bloggers are likely to have some felicity in these practices, so they stand to benefit. Also you are right when you say that the lead bloggers in each category of blogs can play role models to other bloggers in their categories and in this way we can have a domino effect of improvement throught the blogs in each category.
The third suggestion is fair enough. Who could be better placed than top bloggers to evaluate blogs. But we will require some agency to prepare the ground for them, to look into logistics, etc. I can't think of any agency other than IndiBlogger which can play this role.
Are you aware of any blogger's association or some such organization that could step in and take over this function?
If there are not any such organization, we should think of setting up an umbrella organization for Indian bloggers. All other professions have their flagship organization, be they chartered accountants, lawyers, doctors, etc., and someone did mention that blogging is increasingly becoming a profession for many people, especially English bloggers. But again, the question of who will take the initiative remains.
Regarding your advice to me to blog in English, it is well taken. I do have an English blog, which is unfortunately a poor cousin of my Hindi blogs and I haven't paid much attention to it because of my preoccupation with other things. In case you are interested, you could look it up. Here is the link:
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