In Another “Good Blogging” Rule, Daily Dose of Optimism sez:

In my ongoing attempt to clarify “the rules” about what makes a good blog - one that is readable, insightful, and thought provoking - I’m adding a new one:

The Problem: Posts that only offer links to news articles, or simply re-paste an article with 1-2 sentence “parrot observations.” I find these posts are really feeble attempts at creating “value-added content” for a blog’s readers.

The Solution: before you post, ask if your post contains a brief, clear and self-contained idea; if not, keep the post in draft mode until it does.

This is true if the only legitimate function of a blog is to create content; but just like magazine and newspaper editors filter and select content, bloggers can also serve an editorial function. Instapundit comes to mind, for instance, as a source that many readers monitor for the interesting other links that he posts.

In reading others’ original writings, we are leveraging their thinking, in seeing the (hopefully) clearly presented results of research or thinking, issues presented, defended, attacked, and suggested.

However, by viewing “editorial” blogs (as opposed to original-content blogs), we are leveraging the thinking and the reading of the blogger. You and I can’t personally monitor the 15 gazillion blogs in existence; we can’t even glance at them all. And while over time we can find reliable writers who present great material with wit and erudition, there’s simply too much stuff out there to go through and find the good stuff.

Fortunately, there are lots of other people going through that same stuff, and very different subsets and samples of that stuff than we do. And so we will also run across people whose sensibilities are similar enough to our own that what they find interesting and relevant, we find interesting and relevant. And so we also monitor blogs which regularly cull out articles and blog posts that we wouldn’t have found on our own.

Even search sites (Technorati, Ice Rocket etc.) only help if you already know what you’re looking for; what editorial-type blogs do is to alert us to what there is out there to look for, and recommend what to read and why, which is a different thing altogether.