Today’s Links: How to prevent Blog Pollution

Published on 1/6/2006 in Blogging, DailyLinks, Hacks, Productivity and Web 2.0. View Comments Tags: .

dullest blog

It’s easy to end up having a boring blog. Depending on how serious a blogger you are, there are some of us who may be concerned about losing our readership (especially if your readers are not already your friends). Part of the reason is that many of us are simply dumping del.icio.us links onto our blogs on a daily basis. I’m somewhat responsible for this since I wrote that del.icio.us how-to post a few months back. Now I’m hoping to make amends by helping to put a stop to this form of “Blog Pollution”.

What is Blog Pollution?
I refer to blog pollution simply as “the deliberate act of overloading your blog with disorganized information”.

Instead of publishing out random links into your posts, try to put them into usable contexts such as stories or guides (like this one!). Contexualize information is easier to digest since readers know where they belong. I feel that taking the time to fashion, package and present your links add tremendous value to your posts… much like how value increases from raw data to information to knowledge. Take this post as an meta-example of what I mean… Here are interesting things for spicing up your blog life:

UPDATE: Otterman gave his picks from CreativeGuy’s free online file sharing services. Since there’s a feature chart mapping out the various blog services, we really need a similar feature chart to map out file sharing services as well. Any takers? I can almost guarantee the author getting tons of hits for this one!





  • I'm actually pretty happy with my current wordpress.com solution. It allows me to assign multiple categories but doesn't allow me to install pluggins.

    Ah alright...within this post you seems to think that tagging and organizing makes for a more interesting blog. You also say that blog pollution is also caused by random del.icio.us links thus creating a boring blog. We have the exact same problem with digg.com

    While these great blog tagging tools are great, isn't the real issue of blog pollution about creating unique content and not just categorizing it?
  • A lot of them used to be free, ever since the dot com bubble burst they have gone "creative". If your TOS of your service provider allows, you could also run a webserver off your own box. Host your image at flickR, imageshack, etc, hencefore not much bandwidth is sap if you used this combination. You could run linux on an old castaway dust collecting box using linux live cd (just boot the cd and use, no installation needed), so you could just do away with the fuzz and have pretty gd stability. Google for "apache, mysql, linux live cd" that should pretty much get you started off :D
  • Ivan: I see your point... variation is also the spice of life :P

    Sacrelicious: That's an interesting idea... 5gigs appears to offer 100MB free (5gigs = monthly bandwidth; that's marketing!), 1 x MySQL database (for blog CMS to run), and real FTP access. Since the days of free web sites, hosting companies have really gone all out to offer these services which you'd normally have to pay for... Crap! They seem to want you to buy a domain name from them ($10) before they give you free web hosting. I wonder if there are any more catches after that. Anyone willing to try it out?
  • You could try one of the many service that provide free php + mysql support. With that you could load the required service from scratch.
    An example is http://www.5gigs.com/ Google for "free php host" to find your desired deal.
  • Nice to see you adding value to your blog post, Kevin :) You are right -- it's the context of the blog posts that's important. I'm not against posting delicious links (I benefit from links on your site as well). But a balance between more thoughtful (and contextual) posts with pure "delicious" type of posts is what we want. If everything is "value-added", then might just be a tad boring.
  • I doubt any of the free blog hosting services will ever allow plugins. Not Wordpress.com, and not Blogsome.com ever. It's unfortunate but I believe it poses a lot of security concern. The only solution is to host your own blog like I do.

    If anyone knows of a freely hosted blog service that allows plugins, do let us know. People want that!
  • Somehow, del.icio.us has stopped processing my links. And I'm probably gonna' disable the auto-blog posting feature for good.

    For one thing - Wordpress.com doesn't have the ability to install plugins! ARGH!
  • That's a good observation, but I think the chart is still relevant. If you look again, there hasn't been much change for those blogging systems listed. Even WordPress 2.0 has no major feature changes, which is really a shame. The blogosphere has so many more interaction opportunities waiting to be tapped.
  • The only thing with the comparison chart is six months old, which in the computer industry is a very long time. Not the least of which is that several of these software packages have seen significant upgrades since.
blog comments powered by Disqus