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Clear Blogging: How People Blogging Are Changing the World and How You Can Join Them

The Everything Blogging Book: Publish Your Ideas, Get Feedback, and Create Your Own Worldwide Network

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Blogging Etiquette

Use the following guidelines to make sure your blog conforms to standard conventions of the blogging community.

Making Corrections to Your Blog

Bloggers often get blamed for distributing false or erroneous information across the internet. If you uncover new information about something you’ve posted, or if someone points out an error in your blog, it’s easy to update your posts with the appropriate changes.

Delete and replace: If the error is simple or inconsequential, simply correct and republish it.
Strikethrough: To show that you’ve corrected a brief but egregious error, cross out text visibly by surrounding it with the strikethrough HTML tag ( <strike>Text you’d like to change</strike> ). Then type the correct text after the text you just crossed out.
Update: For longer, more complicated corrections, add an update to the top of your post with the correct information in italics (use the HTML tag for italics to italicize your text: <em>Corrected text</em>).
Cross-reference: If the error occurred in an old post, link to the error from a new post in which you explain and correct the mistake. Be sure to include a link to the correction from the old post as well, just in case someone reads your old post in the archives.

Attributing References with Links

Your blog will inevitably contain links to news stories or other blog posts. Blogging about content someone else has produced is fine, as long as you attribute your sources. An attribution should:

Include the name of the source with a link to the original content
Appear within the text of a post, or as a postscript at the end of a post

Comments

Comments make a blog a two-way, interactive conversation. Opening up your blog to strangers’ feedback can sometimes produce unwanted side effects, though, such as belligerence and comment spam. To to avoid these problems, you can turn off comments entirely (every blogging service and software package allows this). If you do want to allow comments, follow these tips:

Positive comments: Acknowledge comments from readers offering tips, advice, links, and thoughtful responses. You don’t have to reply to every single comment, but an occasional grateful response will encourage more positive comments.
Belligerent comments: Acknowledge only those comments that contribute constructively to the discussion. Ignore or delete belligerent and needlessly argumentative comments. If your blogging software or service offers IP banning, you can use this option to prevent belligerent readers from commenting.
Comment spam: Comment spam is unsolicited advertising posted by software called spambots. Most blogging software and services offer a comment-moderation system that allows you to mark comments as spam before they’re posted live to your blog. You can also use this feature to delete belligerent comments before they appear.

Blogging at (or About) Work

Never blog at or about work. Though some bloggers have gained notoriety after getting fired for blogging on the job, it’s never a good idea to blog about work or on company time. It’s not a good idea to blog about work on your own time either. Unless your blog is private (password protected), consider it a public forum in which bashing your boss or your employer could come back to haunt you.

Acknowledgments & Disclaimer