When you have a blog you are supposed to write something, right? When you have enough time on your hands to think about what you want to write and how to accomplish it, mostly you don’t have a problem to do so. But it’s your obligation to blog regularly, if you want to establish a core readership. Then it is really hard to not blog about something wrong, just to fill your blog. Here are three things you should not blog about.

I’m not home, so break in, everybody!

Most personal blogs make the mistake to get too personal. They post information about where they live or when they are on holiday. Without asking they publish pictures of their neighbors or friends. The dangers are obvious, when you look at the consequences: Sites get indexed so fast that even if you take off a picture or a post about anybody, people will be able to find it elsewhere1. And even if you don’t give your address on your blog, people can look up your address by typing in your domain at whois services2. So now they have your address – tell them when you’re gone and your new flat screen will be going on a long holiday, too.

Wash Your Dirty Laundry offline!

Speaking of neighbors or friends – for the same reason you should avoid blogging about them, because they could actually read your blog. Whenever you are angry about someone, go tell your friends offline. If it’s published, you are (much more) accountable for it. Generally speaking, stuff that offends people too much can be healthy for the number of comments on your blog, but you don’t want to sit all day sorting out inappropriate comments, do you?

Go blog (by) yourself!

As I have pointed out in my previous article, you should not take over complete articles by other blogs. Firstly, copying complete posts is against copyright law. And secondly, people won’t keep reading your blog, if you just take content from other sites. They want original content and not what has already been there. You should only let yourself be inspired by what you read on other blogs and create your own content, pointing to others. So share your own perspective on artificial intelligence, for example. Compare it to a movie you have seen and then link to my article as a basic introduction on AI.

  1. e.g. the “cached” button in Google [↩]
  2. e.g. try and search for any domain here. You will see their actual address. [↩]

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