Part Four:
Advanced Topics
Anatomy of a Dowbrigade Posting
What makes a worthwile posting? A blogger can only talk with any real authority about his or her own Blog. My own personal style can be traced back to what was in my youth the epitomy of hip masculine culture and taste - Esquire Magazine's Annual Bests and Worsts issues, which always came around Christmastime. My style still echoes their tantalizing photos, pithy comments and arch humor, or so I like to think.
Here is the Anatomy of the Five Essential Elements of a Dow Brigade Posting:
A: A Catchy Title - I favor alliteration, wry puns and misleading implications. In some aggregators this is all they see.
B: An excerpt from the article I am pointing to, assuming I am pointing to an article, and about 90% of my postings do. I usually take from a few sentences to a few short paragraphs. I sometimes combine sentences from different paragraphs, but NEVER change the actual words I am quoting.
C: My commentary. In many Blogs this is the meat and potatoes, although in mine the articles themselves are the main point and my commentary is usually secondary. Sometime the articles (and photos) speak for themselves. Note: sometime the commentary comes first, as an introduction to the topic or quoted article, sometimes it is broken up and interspersed with the quoted article, and sometimes it comes after the quoted text, as in this example.
D: A link back to the original article - Very important, give credit where credit is due, and give your readers the chance to follow the story back to its source.
E: A picture or photo. I am a strong believer in the "picture worth
a thousand words" dictum, and being basically lazy, I am always ready
to
avail upon
my
E-TAG site
licence rather than type a THOUSAND WORDS.
Advanced Topics:
- Introduction to aggregators and RSS
- How to let others subscribe to your stream
- Multimedia (animation, video, sound)
- Messing with the templates
- The future of blogging
Questions and Discussion
©2003