It is not enough to just have a blog…

The Washington Times has a blog called simply Politics Blog that fulfils the bare basics for blog-hood: Reverse chronological order and permalinks to individual articles. It is even written in a suitably bloggy informal style and takes an irreverent look at issues from an unabashedly partisan perspective.

And yet Politics Blog is not really a good blog for quite technical reasons.

Firstly it does not provide readers with useful sidebar links. Secondly and more crucially, it seems to studiously avoid external links in the blog articles themselves. This is a major failing as the whole point of journalistic blogging is to establish ‘accessible credibility’ and the way you do that is by linking to external sources relating to the things you write about.

For example, in this article called Race Hypocrisy by John McCaslon, an organisation called Project 21 is mentioned as well as the fact that left-wing cartoonist Gary Trudeau referred to Condaleeza Rice as ‘Brown Sugar’. And yet Mr. McCaslon just seems to assume people will take his word that what he says about Project 21 and Gary Trudeau is correct because he does not add links to either Project 21 or the offending cartoon by Gary Trudeau.

There! See how easy that was? If you link to the things you discuss, people actually have some basis for judging the merits of your words and in the on-line commentaries of tomorrow, to write a critical article without external links as citations will start alarm bells ringing as to the soundness of your views. It it not enough to have a blog, you need to know how to blog.