Uses and Abuses of Blogs

Well, folks, I've been in Europe for three weeks, so I got behind on posts to my blog. Time to catch up. I've been thinking lately about the uses and abuses of blogs. Several trends have cropped up that I, personally, find controversial.

The first of these is the trend to post blatant sales pages on blog sites, and call them "blogs". To me, that is nothing but an obvious attempt to gain all the advantages of having a blog, without really having one.

A blog is supposed to contain informative content, and be updated regularly. While I think it is totally legitimate to monetize a blog with PPC ads and/or affiliate links to products the blogger believes in, simply posting one or two blatant sales pages and quitting is NOT what blogging is about.

I run a directory for internet marketing bloggers, and I reject any of these sales pages that are submitted under the guise of being blogs. If the owner of a product were to submit a legitimate blog which happens to extoll the virtues of his or her product, while also giving valuable support and technical information, I would have no problem with it. But a blatant sales page by itself is not a blog, in my opinion.

The second trend that I've noticed is the growing abuse of "blog and ping" strategies. The basic idea is to use your blog to "deep link" the pages within another website, thus getting the website spidered more quickly, and boosting the PR of its inner pages. All well and good, as far as I am concerned.

Where this gets abusive is when people start a blog for no other purpose than to blog and ping. They post almost anything, simply to be able to ping the directories and get the link to their site pages spidered. It gets worse when they use a commercial service to do it for them. I don't think that is legitimate, nor do a lot of other ethical bloggers.

Again the issue is that a blog should be what it is supposed to be; a valuable and frequently updated source of information that stands on its own as an information source for its readers.

The final trend that I have a problem with is the notion of posting to a blog "automatically", without any human intervention. This is done using software that plucks articles from various RSS feeds, and posts them to a blog. The author can literally set up a blog, plug in the software, and never look at the blog again.

How is this abused? Simple. The blog's "author" hopes to benefit from the PPC ads run on the blog sideboard, or from the links from the blog to his main website, but has no intention of actually writing any content for the blog.

I think it would be perfectly OK to sprinkle in some extra content using the software mentioned above, as long as the blogger also regularly added unique content of his own. I might use this myself, for instance, when I'm going to be away from home for several weeks, as I often am, or when I'm immersed in another project, and have limited time to devote to my blog.

When I have a problem with it is when someone uses it exclusively as the content-source for a "blog" that has no human author and no original content produced by the blog owner.

Why do all these trends bother me? Well, first, it degrades what a blog is all about. Second, these abusers will eventually spoil the benefits of blogs for everyone. There will always be people who try to get something for nothing, and I guess each of the three trends mentioned are examples of that.

Maybe I'm just an idealist ...


Happy Blogging!

John.