What Makes a Great Blogger
P.O.W.
The flavor that I like best is POW - right between the eyes. Sometimes POW is a gradual thing, though, evolving over time until the whole emerges like a dazzling multi-threaded fabric. This time lapse can be either a function of the writer’s personality, or a progression of my own comprehension of a field or topic with which I’ve been previously unfamiliar.
Other great flavors of POW include:
- to the heart
- to the senses
- to the funny bone
- to the mind
- to the desires
POW is powerful because it’s personal.
To me, POW isn’t about traffic, it’s about connection. It’s about preferring 10 friends to 1000 acquaintances. If you are blogging full time and readership is important, then you have to convey not only why you care but also make your readers care. That means either writing on a topic that many already care about or becoming a true evangelist.
Even the A-list bloggers on the most popular topics, including news, politics, and web development, are continually evolving as something other than reporters or journalists, because this medium is about personal connection. They’re developing a hybrid between the old forms and pure blogger form. Reading a great blogger isn’t like reading a newspaper or magazine, it’s more like reading a personal letter in conversational form. If the person writing to you obviously cares, then an almost involuntary assumption follows that they care about you.
POW is ‘Pointing Out Why’. Why you care.
Traditional wisdom and advice to anyone taking up writing is to write about what you know best. Yawn. I could be the world’s biggest car geek, and you could be the world’s best mechanic, and you could write everything I ever wished I knew about carburetors and alternators and transmissions, and still manage to put me right to sleep. Start telling me about everything that gets you worked up or passionate, though, and you just woke me up. What you know isn’t going to POW (to) anyone. What you care about is.
The voice that most inspired me to read blogs still resonates with POW at Creating Passionate Users.
Dave Winer’s post is one of my favorites on what a blog is. This isn’t because his definition is all encompassing, it’s because it tells me what turned him, and many pioneer bloggers, on about it all. It defines a personal meaning.
Pointing Out Why can have a general or a detailed focus, or both at once. If you’re a user centric mass market developer, you do have Coding Horror in your reader, right? Even if you personally support Bad Vista? Jeff Atwood talks about details as much as about the big picture in a wry manner but how much he cares is unmistakable.
POW can be subtle. It can also be delivered in an elegant and sophisticated manner. Although I’d never heard of Leon Friend before reading this eulogy at Design Observer, I sat for a moment of silence, both in sadness that I would never know this person, and in respect for the depth of meaning which he had conveyed to others.
Although I read/skim a hundred blogs for the purpose of knowing ‘what’s going on’, the writers I actually stop and read most often are those who care, and take the trouble to convey (or point out) why. It doesn’t matter whether I agree with them often or rarely. I’m a devoted reader of Clay Shirky and Lawrence Lessig and Nick Carr and Anil Dash.
Matt Mullenweg is one of my favorite voices, and although he rarely comes out to play much anymore I click into every single post in the hope that it will be more than a single sentence or link.
Not incidentally, the internet is here, for all of us, because of people who really cared; they’re the reason we can read stuff like this.
The examples linked to here are mostly related to internet and web development, because it is a topic that I write about often, and also because this category accounts for about half of my reads. If you have favorite examples of POW in any category, post them in the comments, please, or email them to me?
Every one of my favorite bloggers is a person that I can easily picture spending time with in lively conversation or even argument on a topic that we both care about. For me those topics include art, design, modern history, being a mom, and many other things in addition to the entrepreneurial or internet related.
Presentation, including mastery of the language you’re using, makes a difference, but to me, hearing what you really care about, what you believe in, makes the biggest difference of all. I don’t have to agree with you, but if you don’t seem to care much, then I likely won’t.
What is your definition of a great blogger or blog post?
