In the beginning, weblogs were little personal pages where you wrote whatever you felt like writing, and a few of your friends, an odd family member, a crazed stalker and other people who were into blogging read it. Many blogs are still little personal pages read only if you're lucky by friends, family, bloggers and stalkers. But others are growing into serious outlets of expression. As more and more blogs emerge and compete for the attention of readers, those that are poorly written will be crowded out. If you don't care whether anyone reads your little personal page, then that doesn't matter. But if you do, then you would do well to consider factors contribute to a good blog.

To gain and retain readership, a blog must: be interesting, be focused, be easy to read (concise and in clear language), and be updated regularly (for web readers only--newsfeed subscribers won't care so much).

Be interesting: If you want lots of people to read your blog, don't fill it with meaningless trivia and odd ramblings. Your friends may be interested in the trivial that you think about ("may" being the operative word), but few other people are likely to. If you want to write about such things, make a blog for them and another for things people are more likely to find interesting. If you feel compelled to put everything in your well-read blog, just post a quick summary with links to the items in the other blog from time to time, all bunched into one post.

Be focused: If you have interesting things to say on a lot of unrelated topics, make a blog for each topic rather than putting it all in one. Why? It's all interesting, isn't it? Well, some of it will be interesting to some people, and some of it to others. I've unsubscribed to blogs that had some very interesting stuff in them because the ratio of what I considered noise to what I considered signal was way too high. It wasn't worth my time even to scan over all the uninteresting stuff.

Be concise: A person who has subscribed to 50 newsfeeds (much less a couple thousand) doesn't have time to read a lot of long essays--at least not if they have a life. Say what you have to say as briefly as you can without losing its essential meaning and emphasis. Cultivate this skill. Practice it. Do it consciously each time you post. The ability to express ideas concisely will not only keep you included in peoples' busy reading schedules, it will give your writing much greater clarity.

Use clear language: Many kinds of language can limit your readership: too verbose (sure, you may sound smart, but if your writing is incomprehensible, then who cares? You may also sound like your not smart enough to express ideas clear language), too much slang (how much is too much, or whether there can be too much, depends on your intended audience--just remember that if you want a broad audience, less slang = more readers), too imprecise (if there's a specific word that expresses what you're saying...and it isn't too obscure...use it instead of a more general term. Otherwise, your ideas will be lost or at least watered down). Poor grammar and spelling also hurt clarity and make reading more cumbersome. Use a spell checker.

In the interest of being concise, I won't write about updating regularly. That's pretty self explanatory.

Happy blogging.