If you hate all of the unoriginal design blogs, this post is for you | Hacker News Reader

If you hate all of the unoriginal design blogs, this post is for you

briancray.com

37 pointsbriancray21 comments

This is a mock post. While there is a place for all of these posts, I’m trying to make a point that original blogs are being shut out by formulaic blogs.

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6. Pretend you are better than your competition and mock them.

Check out the posts on that site http://briancray.com/blog/ How is he any better?

Heh, good point.

"5 absolutely must read books for every web designer"

"10 signs of professional web design (Or why you should drop your amateur web designer)"

"9 compelling reasons to build a single-purpose website"

Brian, I agree with your sentiment, but ... kettle, black?

Tu quoque

I figured someone would point that out. And here's my response:

If you look at all of those posts, they are my original opinion. I'm not simply collecting links and saying "Here it is." That's the difference.

You're also exchanging links with blogs that do the same thing you're writing against. You shouldn't promote those blogs if you feel so strongly against the practice. That being said, I agree with you that any post collecting a bunch of links is a disgusting practice.

But you ARE just collecting links and saying "here they are".

http://briancray.com/2009/06/13/5-web-tools-user-experience/ Just a link with a "sign up for free" blurb.

http://briancray.com/2009/05/04/5-books-web-professionals/ Two sentence synopsis' with a link to Amazon.

http://briancray.com/2009/07/27/eye-tracking-studies-influen... Two sentence synopsis' with a link to the REAL content.

The REAL irony is the title of this post: "5 great examples of popular blog posts that you should know". It falls EXACTLY into your group of "XXX (the more the merrier) great examples of objects being rounded up with unique common characteristic".

Evdawg: That title was an intentional mockery.

There is a huge difference between collecting links to say "here they are -- look at me!" and collecting links to say "hey! look at the content of this link!". Most of the former start with a number -- hence the 5, 10, 20 ego-camp. Most of the latter tend to contain interesting content.

I agreed with the post right up until the bit about "..unless you're Smashing Magazine".

Smashing Magazine only gained their popularity by regurgitating other people's shit - they're no better than the rest.

Well, I think there is room for every kind of post, but Smashing Magazine does roundups WAY better than anything else. What I was saying is if you're going to try to be another Smashing Magazine, just link to Smashing and give up :)

Link to Smashing Magazine so they get the credit instead of the original source? Sounds worse to me.

Good point

higher quality regurgitation. i see smashing magazine as a quality filtering aggregation subscription with occasionally good original content, and i see things like a list apart and alertbox as consistent high quality original content.

thing is, some good stuff makes it to the places that can't be relied on to perpetually produce high quality content, and places like smashing help point out where it is.

for me, hacker news is another filter subscription for the internet which also occasionally has great original content right here. i remember seeing some posts here earlier in the week saying this was a social site....maybe for some, but for me it's a high quality subscription to the internet in general, which replaced previous lower quality filters like reddit.

I guess that's a matter of opinion - I see a LOT of tat on SM.

Perhaps the takeaway here is that one of the top marketing blog commandments - Thou Shalt Post Something Every Day - is slavishly obeyed by so many that we are awash in trite content of little real value.

Arguably, this was the case long before blogs came along, as evidenced by a look at the magazine rack of any supermarket, but the internet has certainly exacerbated that. Indeed, the whole reason for sites like Metafilter or even HN is that they consistently perform dual functions of content discovery and crap filtration which are beyond the capability of most individual editors. Few are given the capacity to be both prolific and consistently profound.

tl;dr the more frequent your blog posts, the less impact they make.

The simple fact is that as long as such posts attract hits, people will keep writing them. Better to just ignore them and focus on creating and consuming good content. It could be time to start filtering my RSS feeds to remove any entries that start with a number...

More than unoriginal blogs, I hate blogs that have a list of a billion ads across the top -- particularly when more than half of them are empty squares that just say "advertise here." If you can't sell ad spots, at least don't show them to me.

Yea. luckily I only have 7.

5 things you can do to come up with original content for your blog.

In most cases and for most occasions there are enough resources out there. So why write something "new" when you can just link 10 or more of such articles? If you don't have anything to add, compile a list instead of just repeating.

I'd say if you're just a list compiler, you shouldn't be blogging. And what are you saying? onreact.com isn't guilt of any of these blogging sins? :)

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