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17 August 2007

BBC NEWS "Blog" - How not to blog

BBC NEWS | The Editors

I subscribed to the BBC News blog weeks ago, and I really can't find a justifiable reason why. I think I did it mainly because they had a blog, and as I am always reading blogs, I thought it would be good to read one put out by a major news organization that is read by everyone - not just bloggers and SEO geeks (sorry everyone, but that's what we are).

What I ended up with was a bunch of blog entries that I now just gloss over in my feed reader without thinking twice. And why shouldn't I? Does anyone out there actually read the BBC Blog?

For starters, the posts I end up reading have very descriptive titles. That's what I need to get me interested, especially when I have 100 new posts to sort through every day!

Take, for instance, this title from SELand:

AOL's Truveo Introduces New Video Search Site And Consumer Destination


What do you think this post is about? It's a stupid question - the subject is in the title. Now, look at this title from the BBC:

Setting up camp

What is this about? After reading the first paragraph, I'm still not sure. This is how it starts off:
It’s a pretty quiet period for news at the moment - fairly normal for August though - and sometimes it can be a bit of a struggle to find enough stories from around the UK.
It turns out that the post is about climate change protesters setting up camp near Heathrow Airport. What's more, it doesn't say much, besides the admission that there aren't many stories around, and so they're just writing about things people can see from their office window.

And even more than that, only the first 2 lines of the post were visible in my feed reader! Why am I going to go out of my way, click on the feed, open it in another window, and read to the middle of the post, just to figure out what the thing is about?

Here's the lesson for bloggers - learn from my inadvertent behavior.
  • Make your titles descriptive and specific.
  • Subscribe to your own feed so that you know what it looks like in a feed reader.
  • Make sure people can read enough of each post in a reader to grab their interest.
  • And... write about interesting stuff - don't just write to be writing!

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