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 think your discussion has a fundamental flaw when you say "there are very clear cut methods for... what is good poetry, novel...etc" in that no, there is absolutely no clear cut method at all.
I'm an Eng Lit student and let me assure you that for five years, all we studied is the different ways to critique literature.There is absolutely no concrete way to measure a good novel or a good poem.
Do not confuse popularity with "being good." If a novel sells well, it doesn't mean it's good. If a movie is popular, it doesn't mean it is good (check Sahil Rizwan's blog for that!)
Appreciation of any art is VERY subjective and blogging is no different. I am a big fan of tech blogs - blogs about new gadget releases, tutorials, how-tos etc. But there as many people who would not be interested in such a blog. I don't follow personal musings blogs but there are enough people who swear by them and there are enough who blog about nothing other than their personal thoughts.
So, my overall response would be that we aren't studying Physics and Math here. There is no solitary right or wrong answer. Blogs are like films, poetry and books - what you might like might not work for me. So, why bother trying to pigeon hole everything - feed what you like and skip what you don't!
cheers!
Prashant.
Think about these to get a picture of what I am trying to say:
- you have a blog that is a delight to see. It has the right colours, eye-catching visuals, the right font-size, the right widgets, and is easy to navigate. But has ****ty content.
- you now have a blog that is hopelessly wrong in its design. It is a pain to move from one post to the other, has practically no widgets. Yet it has breath-taking content, has at least 50 comments, all thought-provoking, on each post.
- you now have a third blog that has all the features of the first, but is a purely commercial blog aiming to maximise earnings. It has content written cleverly from the point of view of fooling Google into posting maximum ads, and has pictures of semi-clad Bollywood actresses on every post to coax viewers back again and again. It drops words like Shahrukh Khan, Bollywood and such words in every sentence so that search engines pick up the posts regularly. The content, however, has no relevance except to Google and other search engines.
We could give more examples on such lines.
Which of these would you rate as the best blog?
No, the relevance to IndiBlogger's blog of day is only tangential. My interest in starting this discussion was how can we tell a good blog when we see it?
At present everything is very subjective, like the five blind men trying to describe how an elephant looks.
In contrast, there are very clear cut methods for telling, for example, what good poetry is, or what a good novel is, or what a good painting is, or what a good building is, etc.
Blogging is also a creative endeavour like literature, painting, architecture, etc. So I thought it will be good if we could debate a bit on the contours of a good blog.
This topic is actually a spin off from another thread that I had started (Is blogging a waste of time?). It was suggested there that it would be a better idea to start a new thread for this topic to keep the discussion focussed.
I think before you putting up this, you should have written why you propose this.
There is a definitive logic about how things work.
ThanksHemal
This is a very interesting debate that you've started.
Can you tell me why exactly are you trying to come up with a system to evaluate blogs? Is it because of IB's blog of the day? Who are these rules supposed to apply to?
cheers!
Prashant.
second you one this one
As there are such a variety of blogs out there, a single yardstick may not work. We might first have to divide blogs into different categories and have different yardsticks for each category.
Some of the categories that come to mind are:
- personal blogs
- commercial blogs
- consultancy type of blogs
- group blogs
- mission-oriented blogs
- more...
Sign in to reply to this thread
