Your detailed guide to what the Pretty Good Blog community is about
Well, what is a blog?
If I answered that here it would definitely make this a blog. So I will refrain.
This is a sort of bonus, in depth informational page for the google plus community page "Pretty Good Blogs."
Yes, I am a blogger, at www.clerkmanifesto.com, but I did not start this page to promote my blog. I started it because I was frustrated that it was so hard for me to find interesting blogs to read, blogs that are, I think, roughly like my own. I look at all the google plus communities, or at major websites, or I just do Internet searches and I find it nearly impossible to find the sort of blogs I want to read. Is the kind of blog I'm interested in so strange? I don't know.
This is all I mean by a pretty good blog:
1. Original material. People just writing, whether on a particular subject, a venture, or about their lives in general. People writing because it interests them, and because they like writing, and because they like to share. I am not looking for gigantic, professional, masterworks of the blog form. With a nod to Garrison Keillor, I'm just looking for pretty good blogs.
2. Living blogs. It seems to me that a huge portion of the most prominent blogs one can find on search engines are dead and abandoned blogs. This is a failure of Google search engines we won't go into (stop me!). I personally post daily, which I'm aware is a lot, but I consider a living blog to have new content of a minimum of once a week. If a blog has new material once or twice a month it is on life support. If someone is sporadically posting over the course of a year it is merely the ghost of a blog.
3. Non monetized blogs. If your blog has enough traffic to make any advertising or monetization worth while, congratulations on your billion readers. People can probably find you on their own and your blog does not belong here. If you start here small and become so wildly famous that you can't resist all the money possibilities, we'll consider grandfathering you in if you're low key about it and support others. If you have ambitions to make money from your blog, or your main goal is to promote something else, I don't think this is in the spirit of the freely given blog we're talking about here, mostly because I think these sorts of motives affect the kind of blog you write.
4. Writing oriented, not picture oriented. The rule here about no pictures on the blog links is unusual for any google plus community. But I think in this context that pictures are deceptive and ultimately a kind of clickbait. Writing an amusing, articulate anecdote about your cat will never compete well against a darling picture or gif out on the restless, distracted Internet. Here is one place to level the playing field a little for something that asks for more than ten seconds of your attention.
5. Autonomous. All the advice to bloggers is about heavy engagement with social media and developing relations with your readers, and asking questions, and developing audience by writing what they want and so on. This may be true if the main goal is to be as popular as possible, but it has nothing to do with the blogs I want to read. The blogs I am talking about should be self contained. I want to read a blog about what it's like to live in Iceland, not a blog that's about creating a community of Iceland interested people.
Well, that's about all for the in depth guide. I do hope you'll post, comment, and link to and on blogs that fit this description. This is a selfish endeavor. I just want to read interesting blogs. Don't you?
