Ever wondered, there are billions of bloggers with zillions of blogs in the blogosphere. Every person connected to the virtual world of world wide web, ends up owning a ‘blog‘. But, what should people write in these blogs? Is there someone who tells you what and what not to write? What is to be done to maintain a blog or may I say ‘a quality blog‘? Are there any ‘rules for blogging‘?
No one is around to settle our curiosity. All the questions remain unanswered. All the doubts unrequited. I tried to answer my queries myself. I thought and thought about the facts on blogging and hardships bloggers face to succeed in maintaining ‘a quality blog‘. I came up with a few enthical to dos and related them to the ‘blogosphere‘. So, here is the first draft of what I call rules for a blog to be called as ‘A Quality Blog‘.
- Post blog entries regularly.
- Always have a title for each blog entry.
- Associate blog entries with labels and categories.
- Do not post material that is obscene, defamatory, harassing, abusive, hateful or embarrassing to another person or entity.
- Provide each post with its own URL called as a ‘permalink’.
- Allow full access to archived posts.
- Allow comments on your posts and pages.
- Respect the opinion of the visitors.
- Identify updated/ corrected content with appropriate label.
- Provide a feed like RSS, Atom etc.
- Respond to the comments.
- Do not post copied content without quoting the source.
- Do not post entries with harmful computer routines like viruses, trojan horses, worms etc.
- Assume full responsibility and liability for all the content you posted on the blog.
It goes without saying that on one hand knowing the rules helps to understand better the constraints on blogging and responsiblity of our actions. On the other hand, knowing the rules helps in knowing which might need to be broken.
