I was thinking, as I frequently do when I write an article, about how blogging has affected the way that I write.

I noticed a few years ago, when the content of many of the blogs I read was pointers to other information, that bloggers like to create posts as quickly and easily as possible (no news there). One of the most common blog entry patterns is:

• find an interesting article
• find an interesting sentence or short paragraph in the article
• drop the paragraph into the post, with a short lead-in and a ‘thank you’ or ‘from’

This means that, in order to have your article linked to and read, it is essential to have a good sentence or paragraph that represents the point you want to make. While this is a general principle of good writing, it is particularly important when writing for distribution via blogs.

It is something that I do after finishing writing an article – go back and make sure that there is something that is easy to pick up.

So in that vein, here are the magic paragraphs from an article that I recently co-wrote with Tina Calabria � 10 ways to continuously improve your intranet:

The amount of work involved in designing a new intranet or redesigning an existing intranet is minor compared to the time needed to maintain an effective intranet over the longer term. In fact, it is common for the initial excitement of a new intranet to fade away as the reality of day-to-day maintenance and the challenges of improving the intranet become apparent.

For this reason, intranets tend to go one of two ways after launch – they either stagnate with few new features added over time or become masses of unstructured content and functionality created in a random fashion.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 7th, 2004 at 7:29 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.