Everybody's Bloggin' At Me: Evan Williams, the head cheese at blogger.com, points out that in the month of July 1.5 new blogs were created every minute, and that's just via blogger.com. Everybody's doing it, but few are doing it well. It's important to remember that, once you get past all the cool technical stuff, blogging is writing, and good writing takes effort. Alistapart.com recently published a great set of ten guidelines to good blogging and it's well worth reading for everyone who started one of those 45,000-ish blogs created last month.

Bad personal sites bore us by telling us about trivial events and casual encounters about which we have no reason to care. Don’t tell us what happened: tell us why it matters. Don’t tell us your opinion: tell us why the question is important.

If followed, that advice would eliminate about 75% of the blogs in the world.

I do pretty well with respect to these guidelines. I could do better on the "post often" front. And number 8, "be sexy," seems more like promotional advice than a writing tip; ignore that one, it falls into the too-much-information category. But still: Bloggers, read these and think about what you write. You'll be better off for it.

Lucky for me:

Most readers will overlook, and nearly all will forgive, errors in punctuation and spelling.

Dodged that bullet.