This started out as a comment `over here <http://www.thomascrampton.com/2007/09/06/how-to-be-an-uber-blogger-by-cory-doctorow/>`_, but I think has evolved into a blog post of it's own, so here's my commentary
I think this is pretty good advice, clearly, and the "hey folks, we're taping over here," line was priceless. Well, maybe not priceless, but that's the general idea.
I would like the offer commentary, on this advice, however:
I think the "don't make it hard for people to read your work," is good universal advice, but it's not so much about blogging as it is, about distribution and creation. I remember not so long ago that blogger wouldn't publish full RSS feeds (or any feeds, possibly) and I had a policy of not reading any blogger feeds for just this reason. So good advice there, no surprise.
The "write wire-style" stories is also good advice, but it's particularly good advice for blogs that are more like wireservices. Like, boing boing, and slashdot. And in a lot of ways I read these sites as if they were wire services, in search of tidbits that I think would be interesting for my blog, or some-such. So if you were writing a blog, like this, it's a great model to use.
This also assumes that the primary route of new traffic to the average blog are are people browsing google or technorati, and while that's probably true of blogs like boing boing, that's far from a universal. For instance, for a great number of weeks a post of mine on TealArt called "Cool Nicknames" was my incoming link from google, because people were googling "cool nicknames." Now I would love if you thought that people coming in from this search were looking for something other than a list of cool nicknames, which I wasn't providing then, and am not likely to start any time soon. And I know I wasn't following Cory's advice here, but still, I'm not sure that this blog (and this is true for many blogs) are providing the same kind of information that search engines are best at finding, or that most people would think to look for on a search engine.
This means that, even if you write the best headlines and opening sentences, you still won't get new readers, because you're writing pieces about email organization, or the lessons of your latest science fiction project, or thoughts on the collaboration model of open source software for other sorts of projects. Even the people who are interested in these things, and willing to read about them, probably wouldn't think to browse google, looking for blogs. This leads me to an alternate mode of "encouraging" blog discovery:
I see blogging as part of an ongoing conversation. Conversations that I'm having with myself, conversations that I'm having with you the readers about what's going on in my life, conversations that I'm having with people who are (theoretically commenting on the blog), and conversations--like this one--that I'm having with other bloggers.
People don't stumble into the conversations via search engines, they stumble upon them by reading other parts of the conversation. By talking to you in real life, by finding you in IRC rooms, or on listservs, by reading other blogs that link to you, by reading your comments in other peoples blogs, and by reading your comments in their blog.
While you still have to write regular blog entries (which is really important, lets not forget that), reading and participating in other blogs, and other parts of the internet community is at least as important.
At least I think so, we'll see how it works out.