One common mistake — particularly among beginning bloggers — is to treat all of the thoughts that come to you at one time as one post. You might sit down to start writing about the day’s news and end up jumping from one story to another and back again before you’re finished.

Resist the temptation to cover multiple, unrelated subjects in one post.

If you find yourself wanting to include multiple topics in one post, write multiple posts instead. Not only will your readers be able to browse your content far more efficiently, but your blog will look fuller (more posts is usually a good thing), your posts will be better written (multiple topics in one post leads to convoluted analysis), and other bloggers will be more likely to link to the specific points you make.

And if you do split a post into two, try post-dating them so that they don’t all go up at once.

Do you agree?

How do you define what you do? It’s important, and if you’re a blogger, it’s more difficult than it first might seem. When people ask me what I do, I often find myself saying “journalist” or “writer” when I’m talking to someone who might not know what “bloggers” do (granted, the kind of blogging I do most of the time would fit into those categories).

There are a lot of different answers to the question “What is a blog?”

The easy answer is that it’s a format for quick and easy self-publishing that is interactive with readers. For progressive political bloggers, you could define it at a cocktail party as an up-to-date web site where you spend a little time each day (or every few days, or every week) making arguments in favor of your political opinions using evidence and examples from recent news.

From Wikipedia:

A blog (a portmanteau of web log) is a website where entries are written in chronological order and commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), audio (podcasting) and are part of a wider network of social media. Micro-blogging is another type of blogging which consists of blogs with very short posts.

As of September 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 106 million blogs.

From Problogger Darren Rowse:

To put it as simply as possible - a blog is a type of website that is usually arranged in chronological order from the most recent ‘post’ (or entry) at the top of the main page to the older entries towards the bottom.

…

Blogs are usually (but not always) written by one person and are updated pretty regularly. Blogs are often (but not always) written on a particular topic - there are blogs on virtually any topic you can think of. From photography, to spirituality, to recipes, to personal diaries to hobbies - blogging has as many applications and varieties as you can imagine. Whole blog communities have sprung up around some of these topics putting people into contact with each other in relationships where they can learn, share ideas, make friends with and even do business with people with similar interests from around the world.

How do you define what you do?