How to blog with great substance

How to blog with great substance

Nowadays, blogging seems to be a popular activity. Many people are jumping into this popular bandwagon of the so called Web 2.0. Blogs are mushrooming everywhere, making the world of internet so interesting and colorful. However, the blogs with true substance are rare gems. It might take us a long time to find a few of them.

I would like to make it clear that the issue is not about judging whether a blog is good or bad. First of all, good or bad is up to the reader to decide. It is something subjective and debatable. People blog for many reasons. They might use their blog as a platform to publish conspiracy theories, sharing hacking secrets and putting up porn pictures of young teenage girls. What they do with they blog, is their personal matter. This makes judging a blog objectively “good” or “bad” meaningless. What we are interested is, whether the blog has substance or not.

I am not saying that blogs that lack substance are “bad”. I do not think that there is a direct correlation between substance and “quality”. For example, FAILblog has a lot of silly (but quite funny) pictures. It appears to be non-intellectual, but it is still a pretty good blog, as it is very entertaining and serves its main theme pretty well. Kenny Sia, a popular Malaysian blogger, might be accused of lacking substance, but I think his blog is a very good blog. Its layout is superb and the blogging style is nice (a balance of words and pictures) and most importantly, it is entertaining, although some guys get jealous when he appears to be surrounded by pretty girls and free goodie gifts.

A typical Malaysian blog (to a certain extend, Singaporean blog as well) shows photos of the blogger’s eating or traveling experience, rant about mundane stuffs and occasionally, give their opinions on political or current issues. It looks fine, but after seeing through many pages of the same food and cam whoring photos, it is hard not to find it repetitive and lacks substance, since those stuffs are all it has to offer. I started to think, why can’t they generate substantial content? Why there is no material other than those trivial matters mentioned above? Coincidentally, another blogger pondered about it too on this site (it sounds like a Déjà vu!). More importantly, simply pointing fingers on these blogs does not help much. We need to think of constructive ways to improve them so that those who choose to improve their blogs can do so.

I think it is helpful to show contrast by giving examples of blogs with substance (they can be the “role models”). KCLau is a friend of mine. He is multi talented and maintains a personal finance blog, a musical blog, and a music learning blog. Obviously, his blogs have a lot of substance as you can see a lot of facts, figures, graphs and charts flying every where with detailed explanation. We can absorb a lot of knowledge by reading his blogs. How does he blog with great substance? He blogs what he knows best. As a financial planner, he has sufficient knowledge background to support his financial blog’s content. As a musician, he shows what he knows best on his music blog. If he is to write a political or comical blogs, those blogs will lack substance, as those stuffs are not in his knowledge nor interest domain.

Another great example is Sheylara.com, a blog that I like to read. Sheylara is an actress/model and a hard core game player from Singapore. Just like KCLau, she blogs about what she knows best. After playing so many games for years, she can blog about games like an expert. She even conducts gaming Q and A on her blog. She can talk about acting and modelling pretty well as she is an “insider”. That makes her blog so entertaining, with great substance. I also follow Jackie Chan’s diary. I learned a lot about film making, charity and business from this great guy. All these blogs are good example of substantial blogs.

I would conclude that, without much knowledge or input, the blog will lack substance as the author will not have much to offer. Maybe the author will just toss some photos and that’s all. Good output needs the backing and support of sufficient input. I would like to say that to have a substantial blog, it is best to pick a core theme that one knows best. A music student can blog about song writing or singing, an engineer can talk about technology and so on. On top of the core themes, the author can add other mundane stuffs like daily rants and camwhore pictures as the icing of the cake. That would create a balanced and interesting blog with nice substance.

I think it is perfectly fine if you want to blog about stuffs that you are not so familiar with, but make sure that you do your homework by researching the topic. Use Google and Wikipedia to read about the topic to get a general idea. For example, a movie review blog post is substantial if the author can tell about the director and actor’s past works, comparing the movie to other works of the same genre, its technical details like costume design, audio editing, marketing strategy and so on. Without doing research, you might only be able to say “it is a cool movie! W00t!”

I think by now we are quite clear on how to blog with substance. I hope with this simple guideline, the blogsphere will have more blogs with great substance. I believe some of us are getting tired of reading the same old mundane stuffs and camwhoring all over the internet. Maybe we need a bit of change.

Good night!