Bloggers 7 Deadly Sins

Inspired by the Evangelical Blog Awards, I have written out 7 Deadly Sins that ‘evangelical bloggers’ should avoid:

1. Using your blog to pimp your books or yourself as a conference speaker. The words “Click Here and Check Out Our MP3 Shopping Cart” should not be the first words to appear on your blog.

2. Using scary Armageddon fonts and color schemes.

3. Writing those old media things called “articles” rather than adapting to a shorter blog genre

4. Narrow-focusing on your spiritual life and avoiding your other areas of interest as REAL PEOPLE.

5. Claiming to blog on a particular interest and not staying on track.

6. Becoming just a news service for people without RSS. Hey, we bloggers are supposed to MAKE the news, not just tell it. Lets be more than journalists! Change the world and talk about it as you go.

7. Failing to offer comments on every post to enable self-accountability and the almighty LOOP.

Newbies should pray the Blogger’s Prayer and read Jonny Baker’s “Idiot’s Guide to Starting a Blog

Also check out Keith’s 7 Commandments including. . .

6. Accept him whose blog is weak, without passing judgment on disputable matters…Let us stop blogging judgment on one another… whatever you believe about these things keep between yourself and God. Blessed is the man who does not condemn himself by what he approves. (Ro 14 1-22)

Andrew

Andrew Jones launched his first internet space in 1997 and has been teaching on related issues for the past 20 years. He travels all the time but lives between Wellington, San Francisco and a hobbit home in Prague.

17 Comments

  • adam says:

    my blog has been recently mirrored by one of those scarry armagedon blogs…

  • sheena says:

    i’m afraid this will turn into a tacky blog confessional. i have the curse of long posts. i’m a bit of a web moron so i don’t know how to do the little link to keep reading.
    it has to be asked, though…who writes the rules on blog etiquette? it’s rather subjective, isn’t it? are there comprehensive rules or just personal preferences? how would Jesus blog? 😉

  • sheena
    good questions! please take my thoughts as MY thoughts and weigh them up with other BigMouths on the web.
    – and Jesus would not blog – Luke would blog (check out Acts) but not Jesus.
    Jesus liked to write in the sand so it is obvious that today he would run a wiki.

  • sheena says:

    is your mouth big? at least you aren’t sassy like me!
    please be assured i’m not quite so cheesy as to be serious in asking how Jesus would blog. i love to poke fun at “Christian” marketing, being from the States we see way too much of it! i think it would be funny to start wearing “H.W.J.B.” wristbands and see if they catch on. would you wear one?

  • FYI. This post was featured on SmartChristian.com/blog. Andy

  • Keith says:

    Thanks for the link. Keep on blogging!

  • brad says:

    I certainly have a different perspective when it comes to articles versus the shorter blog media. If people do not have the desire to read a 15 minute read then go to instapundit. Obviously most blog readers are surfers but that isn’t some blogs audience. I like a 45 minute sermon and a 50 minute worship set. But to each his own…I went to the Vineyard and services used ot be 2 hours +. I quess I learned stamina.
    brad

  • sheena says:

    i just can’t get myself to be concise. if you think my blog is wordy you should hear me trying to leave a voicemail. i start with every intention of keeping short…i just can’t pull it off.

  • Andrew Jones says:

    Hi.
    I think a good reason for keeping blog postings short and on a single topic is because, unlike articles with many points (or sermons with 3 points), a blog post is a discrete piece of knowledge that gets archived on the worlds biggest encyclopdia, and is called up by people searching for something on that topic.Or in other words, blog posts exist in modular form, rather than in singular form,. It is the modularity that keeps it short, rather than people’s attention span.
    Marshall McLuhan once said that in the future, everything would come down to a “blurb”. I think we are now there, and there is good reason.

  • brad says:

    So does that mean that all songs downloaded from the internet should be only one verse.
    What if we see posts as works of art..which I do and not encyclopedic blurbs..
    brad

  • andrew jones says:

    Hi Brad
    one song should be one song – as a discrete unit, otherwise you will have 5 verses on your hard drive, or in the case of some old hymns, 17 verses, and no one wants to have to link them all together.
    Sorry if i am confusing people. I believe that being SINGULAR is more important than being SHORT. Because a single post will be aggregated and used in a modular fashion by search engines, people looking for ONE THING, and it makes it less confusing to comment on one thing.
    An article, with its 3 or 4 points, is difficult to comment on without having to say which point or part or statement you are referring to. Of course, an article is an OLD MEDIA form and was not designed to have immediate response written on it from around the world. A blog post is.
    And Brad, if a blog post is a work of art, and sometimes mine is – i often will post a poem or picture – then i still think that people would like to put a hypertext link to that exact piece of art rather than to a gallery of 50 pieces of art and make the person scroll through it all to find it. Even better to have someone comment on the exact piece of art, rather than the whole gallery. This is why Flickr is effective for photo sharing and appreciation – because each photo can have a UNIQUE address.

  • brad says:

    Is it possible that to have a more impressionistic effect, we need to look at ways to change the nature of a blog interaction by changing the current interface. I would much prefer to visit a bloggers “gallery” or read his or her “book” than a short one point blurb. I think blogging is mainly self-expression and not linking information. The revolution is a self-expression revolution as well as an information revolution. The last thing I personnally need is more information.
    brad

  • andrew jones says:

    exactly:
    we dont want more information – we want to be protected against it, filter not feed, access but not acquisition.
    – when you change to typepad, you will have “categories” that will act as a gallery for your posts. this is one reason i switched from blogger.
    – what you are talking about – a better navigation system to enable a large number of (disparate) posts to aggregate on one page, is the future of books – and yet the individual posts that make up the gallery (or images for your album) will remain in their singular format.
    good example of this is jonnybaker’s blog – the single category called worship tricks, containing 100 worship experiences, is probably better than any “book” on practical alt, worship.

  • Blogging

    { MOOD: Hip | ITUNES: “Rhythm of the Night” – Valeria } Here are a few interesting blogging tips. First, from TallSkinnyKiwi: Bloggers 7 Deadly Sins 1. Using your blog to pimp your books or yourself as a conference speaker….

  • Bill says:

    Thanks for your thoughts, Andrew, both in the post and in these comments. I have noticed how difficult it is to carry on a conversation with ten “simple” points in it!
    It seems to me that it would be easier if we (meaning I) tried to keep things more focused.
    What do you think about the practice of writing a series of posts in order to cover several different aspects of something?

  • Andrew Jones says:

    hi bill
    hope you enjoyed Soularize.
    yes, a series of posts, and then provide a short navigational page or post that contains hyperlinks to all of them.
    And the beauty of individual singular posts is that not only can people comment on each one, but you can send them out one by one through RSS. And our newsreaders are really designed for one headline with one thought.

  • sheena says:

    is duplication a blogger sin? i thought i was so brilliant to post links to my google-translated page, only to pop over here and see you had already done it. does that make me a copy-cat, or does it just verify that great minds think alike? 😉

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