Overtime blogs have become a great way for large groups of people with similar likes and dislikes to come together and share their thoughts in a public domain. People have been able to take blogging and make it into a living. But there are many different types of blogs and not all of them are that great or informative.
Some of the most widely known blogs are mommy blogs. They’re the cute and fancy blog sites where moms can post about great products, remedies and activities their kids like. Unfortunately many of the mommy blogs are more of just mom’s trying to sell you a product or bragging about their kids accomplishments, verses them actually sharing important and useful information.
One of the first big things a successful blog should so is have a purpose. In author George Orwell’s book “Why I Write” he describes four main reasons actually worth writing for.
“Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living” (Orwell 4).
Orwell continues on and describes the four as being, sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose. In the two mommy blogs I have chosen to compare against each other, one of them I feel has a purpose while the other just seems like a mom writing nonsense.
The first one is the Disney Family blog, which is run by Disney and is made for moms/all families. It has everything from blog threads to videos about fun family crafts, recipes, remedies and family activities. In my opinion the Disney blog is an example of Orwell’s aesthetic enthusiasm. It’s a blog that has stories and articles describing an experience that is valuable. The other blog on the other hand, Soulemama, is just one massive story, that jumps around, uses random euphemisms and by the end of the first entry I still had no idea, what the author was trying to articulate.
Another aspect of good verses bad blog writing is the actual structure of the content and how it’s presented.
On the Australian Government’s webpage about content structure, it says “Use short, simple paragraphs. Limit paragraphs to 2 or 3 sentences containing 1 idea. Or break text up into bullet point lists. Allow for lots of white space.”
The Disney Family blog, has different tabs, and different sections that encompass different stories. They also have videos and pictures that break up the text and within one post, they use different sub titles and bulleted lists so it’s easy to extract all the important information without having to read and re-read the same block of text. In other blog, there is no navigation, it’s just one long running lists of posts with no titles to separate the different stories. Each post is hundreds of words and the paragraphs are massive blocks that never seem to end.
The content structure web page also described making content easily readable on all devices because blogs are made for the digital audience and each person can have a variety of devices that can access the blog.
“People use a variety of devices to access government information and services. These include mobile phones, tablet devices (for example, iPads), desktop computers and laptops. Use responsive design methods to make sure users can read your content on all their devices. It can be much harder for some people with disability to use a mobile device than a desktop or laptop computer. Think about how the content will work on a mobile device first. Then think about how it will translate to a larger screen.”(Australian Government)
When you look at the Disney Blog on a phone verses a laptop, the content shifts around, but still is easy to navigate through and you don’t miss anything, but the Soulemama blog just shrinks everything so the long running blocks of text become very hard to read.
Both blogs aren’t anything life changing nor do they carry world shifting information, but by one blog just structuring the writing and content better audiences get more out of it, versus the blog that just threw text down as if they were just talking without any format or structure, which creates boring never ending text blocks that readers typically skim over or skip.
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