Here are some unique styles of blogging that you may find interesting.
1. Techcrunch – If there’s news about company X launching a new product called Y, most tech blogs would simply publish that news with their own commentary but it’s not that easy for Arrington. His interns will first create new entries for both company X and product Y on CrunchBase and then the news would go live on the main TechCrunch site with the company or person’s name often linking back to the CrunchBase entry instead of the official website.
2. Jason Calacanis – Most people think that Mahalo founder Jason has quit blogging but it’s not true. The only difference is that Jason now uses an email editor to write his blog post instead of some blog editor – his email messages still get published as blog entries (see example) and can be read via feeds.
3. Daring Fireball – Apple guru John Gruber has an extremely unique blogging style. The title of his blog articles do not point to the permalink of that post but instead they link to the main story that John is commenting upon. Subscribe to his feed and you’ll definitely fall in love with this style of linking.
4. John Battelle – While most bloggers (A-list crowd included) worry about writing attention grabbing headlines, John knows how to convey his message using one liners. See some examples from John’s search blog here, here and here – you get the picture without having to read an essay.
5. Philipp Lenssen – Philipp’s blog is an interesting mix of a blog and an online forum where anyone can post messages without having to register. When something interesting or newsworthy is posted in the forums, Philip “promotes” that thread to turn it into a blog post and also attributes the person who originally started that thread.
6. Matt Drudge – The design may look ugly but Drudge Report, a site that first broke news about the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, is clearly the most "selfless" blog on the web. This one page blog consists only of links to other news websites and columnists.
7. Dave Winer – Ask any “blogging guru” about their secret recipes and they’ll always recommend one thing – add good quality photographs (or even screenshots) in blog posts to make them look more “appealing”. Dave is more creative and prefers using clip-art images to illustrate his ideas – see examples here or here. Another unique feature of Dave’s blog is that you can directly link to any paragraph in the blog – just get the URL from the # sign.
8. Engadget – Look at any Engadget article and you’ll find that all links but one are internal and point to one of their own articles. The source (if any) is attributed at the end and the anchor text reads the same for all external links – READ. Here’s an example.
9. Mivox – Mivox doesn’t use a computer keyboard to write blogs. Instead he writes articles on a piece of paper using ink and then puts a photograph of this paper on to his blog. PostSecret would also classify as a handwritten blog though none of the postcards are written by Frank Warren himself.
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/blogging/interesting-blogging-styles/6411/
Reader Comments
That is some awesome analysis.
Written by Manan on 01.07.09
A very interesting observation Amit, especially Michael Arrington’s one. It is so true :)
Written by Vikas SN on 01.07.09
Well if i person does all of these … We can call him successfull..
Written by Nabeeha Khan on 01.07.09
For what it’s worth, Daring Fireball isn’t all that unique. It’s basically a tumblelog. Every single Tumblr blog works the same way.
Written by mrshl on 01.07.09
Mrshl – You have a valid point but there’s a small difference between Tumblr blogs and Daring Fireball. If you subscribe to any Tumblr blog, the title of the posts will always link back to tumblr while in the case of Daring Fireball, he links the title to the source website. Minor change but I find it unique.
Written by Amit on 01.07.09
@Techcrunch, i think they are no more linking company website back to the crunchbase entry…rather they are displaying the company details below the post through crunchbase data…!!
Written by Kevin on 01.07.09
@Amit Oh, you mean in the feed? Yeah, that is cool.
Written by mrshl on 01.07.09
Yes, I am a regular participant on John Battelle’s blog (since my focus is in information [storage and] retrieval).
John can write almost chapter-length blog entries too, though (but they’re definitely worth reading). It’s quite easy to tell that he’s not a noob to writing in an engaging manner.
What you point out about the terseness and directness of his headlines is also what twitter is all about — indeed: it’s what twitter means (and that is a major reason why twitter is so successful — much like cars.com, it delivers what it says… a phenomenon I have coined “the Wisdom of the Language” [meaning the high signal/noise ratio found at keyword / topically focused websites -- see also link :]).
Written by Norbert Mayer-Wittmann on 01.07.09
I’m not even a Mac owner but I’ve been subscribed to Daring Fireball for a long time now. I like both Gruber’s link posts and the more in-depth articles and comment he writes.
Written by John Lampard on 01.07.09
You should add your style too…
1)Always providing lucid explanations to the simplest of stuff and that too in plain english
2)Never pandering to get techmeme glory…
3)Never indulges in blog fights or in calling names
4)Writing primarily for an international audience
ummm.. what else..
5) Mentioning self as “professional blogger and personal technology columnist for a national newspaper” in the same sentence though the latter might hardly be any effort or paying any bills :)
Written by NE on 01.08.09
Awesome analysis.
Written by Shevonne on 01.08.09
Excellent !
Written by Prasun on 01.10.09
Sumocat’s Scribbles is another good example of an ink blog. Though if one has a tablet PC or a PDA then ink blogging can be an easy task since one would be able to save the handwritten text as image ready to be published on blog & hence save the trouble of photographing or scanning the page! :) link thing on my Windows Mobile; though saving the post was convenient but small screen of phone was not exactly convenient to write. But a tablet PC would be far better due to bigger screen size! :)
Written by amit on 01.10.09
Whoa! Awesome statistics sir!
Written by Praval Singh on 01.10.09
Really interesting collection. Didn’t know about Ink Blogs till now!!
And thanks for linking to my post link ! Do let me know if there are some other articles/blogs that I should’ve mentioned!
Keep Blogging!
Written by RaSh on 01.12.09
Interesting summary of blog styles Amit. The important thing I think is that a blog style must suit both the blogger’s and target reader’s personality.
And what a gem in finding your blog too; great stuff.
Written by Gino Cosme on 01.13.09
Thanks for the shout-out. If I could, I’d like to mention two more advantages of my style using a Tablet PC vs. other handwritten blogs: I include text conversions for search engine indexing and employ a unique method for including hyperlinks in the entries (Links in Ink). Enables me to keep it inky without sacrificing Google love.
Written by Sumocat on 01.14.09
Great review about famous blogger.But the big name is missing… any guess..
what about labnol.org in this list…
Written by fasil on 01.19.09
Blog: A product of Modern Technology for Better English Communication.(please answer the following questions)
These questions were made for our Term Paper. Please help us by answering the questions below.
1. How does blog affect the traditional way of writing?
2. What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of Blog?
3. How does blog help you? Do you think it develops your Intellectual skills?
4.Blog : not just a hobby, but also a profession. Do you agree with the sentence? why?
5. Blog: A product of Modern Technology for Better English Communication. Do you think the statement is true? why and how?
thanks for answering! It helped us a lot! God Bless us all!!!
Written by zelle on 02.24.09