Blog Posting Formats Best Defined by Type of Blog

Blog Posting Formats Best Defined by Type of Blog

November 16th, 2009 @ Paul Chaney

A few years ago blogger Amy Gahran introduced a series of posts about blog posting formats in which she outlined seven styles:

1. Link-only
2. Link blurb
3. Brief remark
4. List
5. Short article
6. Long article
7. Series postings

(I'll let you read her post to get more detail.) 

Well, that was then, this is now as they say. Blog posting formats are better defined today by the type of blog than the particular style. Instead of seven, you now have three: Long-form, short-form or micro-blogging. 

Long-form

Bloggers have gotten quite verbose in recent years. Some posts resemble essays containing hundreds of words or more. These tend to be (hopefully) more well-researched and almost article-like in their composition. Case in point, Jeremiah Owyang's blog Web Strategist Brian Solis. (See comment from Jeremiah below.) My, that man can write! His are some of the most thoughtful compositions I've seen. (That's true of both men.)

There is no one particular "long-form" blogging platform. Any of the traditional ones are suited to that purpose. Where the difference really evidences itself is in a newer form of blogging commonly called short-form.

Short-form

This style of blogging is a good fit for when more traditional (i.e. long-form) "blogging is too much and tweeting is too little," to quote Damien Basille.

There are a number of such platforms now: Posterous, Tumblr, and a new theme Typepad is introducing to address this space, Chroma. (UPDATE: See announcement from Typepad today regarding its new Typepad Micro.)

My short-form blog is my "everything else" blog. I try to keep this blog very topically-centric, but there are times when it's useful to post something not on topic. Short-form blogs fit the bill. (BTW, I'm going to be transitioning from Posterous to Chroma soon.) As Econsultancy suggests in this post, there are any number of ways to use this format.

Micro-blogging

Of course, we all know what this means: Twitter. 140 characters to share everything from links to valuable online resources to what you had for dinner to everything else in-between. (And, sharing links to resources trumps sharing what you had for dinner hands down.)

Blogging continues to evolve. There was a time that it appeared to have lost its place in the new scheme of things, but I think now it has secured its positon as a hub for all one's social media activity…or it should be anyway…and, therefore, is still very relevant. I, for one, am glad. 

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Category : Blogging