Bloggers Unite: Let’s Keep the Blogosphere Clean

Our water, air, and soil is polluted. Space is polluted too somehow. And so is the blogosphere!

In August of last year, Brian Cray wrote a single blog post that not only grabbed my attention – I remembered where to find it five months later. He wrote about 5 great examples of popular blog posts that you should know.

The post isn’t really what it seems to be. In fact, Brian chose the title for the purpose of raising the eyebrows of the design community which has seen a massive influx of design blogs – some great and useful, others not so much. He issued a call back to originality with the closing words of his post:

Unless you’re Abuzeedo doing inspirational posts or Smashing Magazine doing roundups, this is a call to stop using these formulas and think of new ways to add value to your readers and to the community.

Provide a practical how-to
State strong opinion
Research something new and report it
In some way teach readers something
Do smaller, detailed roundups for a specific cause

Brian was bold and even polarizing. As a blogger, he was willing to create a stir… or even a stink. You may read his post and completely disagree with his thoughts and may have valid counterpoints of your own. But there are two things we need to acknowledge about Brian’s post:

1. He’s bearing the truth. It’s impossible to glance around the blogosphere long and not see the volumes of junk being pumped into the industry’s atmosphere. Linkbait has its place, like candy bars, but a steady diet of fluff won’t take us where we need to go in the future.
2. He started a conversation. He forced a lot of people in the design community to examine and evaluate their own blogging habits, which is the kind of conversation our industry definitely needs.

In order to keep the industry clean, we need to ask some hard questions. Are we willing to make traffic and monetization secondary to quality and trust? Are we willing to suffer criticism and endure controversy to push people to think beyond the current boundaries? Are there going to be true thought leaders among the blogging industry, or will we all just follow each other around, repeating the same techniques forever?

So let’s keep the blogosphere clean, shall we? Let’s have a goal of purity in our writing, honesty in our marketing, excellence in our design, and potency in our content. Thoughts? I know you’re bound to be thinking something after all that you just read…

Brandon has been doing web and logo design and this blogging thing for about six years. He’s also a Pastor. He lives in Arkansas with his wife and daughter and they’re expecting their second child. You can catch him on Twitter or Facebook.