Anyone can blog. That's how easy it is. Anyone that can regularly string a few words together into a (semi) coherant sentence will find out how easy it is to start a blog. The only problem with this equation is that not everyone can blog well, which thew point of me writing this. Now I'm not going to list down the cardinal evils of blogging because that would just be a ridiculously long list. My pet peave of the day just happens to come from something we in the blogging community see far too often – Reblogging.

Basically, what reblogging is, is just taking your content from other sources and using it as content from your blog. I mean I don't mind if you're just taking what someone else blogged about and giving your own opinion on it, writing it in your own way. That's what blogging should always be about anyway – your take on things. Reblogging destroys that.

This post, The Evils of Constant Reblogging has it right by saying that constant reblogging deteriorates a quality of a blog and in this world where blogs are exploding by the thousands each day, it's the quality of a blog we should be looking for, not the constant photocopies of what someone else has written before.

So what if a blog if a blog ends up being a cited post to another blog or news that you can find anywhere? I mean, we have all seen the ridiculous amounts of posts on Nano and Flock (which I am also guilty of writing). But what seperates a good blog from a reblog? The answer is simple really, heart and soul. As I go back to the opening of this post, anyone can blog as long as they can string words together, but at the heart of every blog is in its individuality to express what is theirs. The passion to put down who they are for the whole world to see. I don't mind if you blog another post on the Nano or Flock, but for God's sake…don't end up with a few sentence saying how good or bad it is and have the rest of a post be something I can find on some popular news site.

The only thing that pisses me off more than anything about reblogging is the fact you're reblogging for the sole purpose of profit. Blogs that have news cited directly from other sources which happen to be swarming with ads. Why should I help you get money something I can get for free elsewhere? I would rather help support the other bloggers who write these things first hand with their own head, it makes much more sense anyway. You know what I categorise these ad smothered reblogs under? Spam blogs.

Taking this into context, I blog a lot about WordPress most of it though may happen to things you'd notice on your WordPress RSS feeds (in fact I got the idea for this post from one of those feeds). Now the reason why I write a lot about WordPress is because I know many of the people that work on it. Occassionally I help out and beta test the things that would eventually go into WordPress particularly certain essential plugins. It isn't just something you can find on some sites, it's something I actually talked about, picked apart, tried and tested first hand and I'm letting people know what it is all about so that they can be informed about it.

When it comes to blogging, especially about the facts, it isn't about who machine guns you with information first. It's who can give you the hands on detail knowing exactly what's going. Just remember, no one likes to be told the same joke over and over again, but people like something new. It doesn't matter whose flavour it might be, it's better to be original than something stale. It's something many bloggers take for granted…and that just ruins the whole experience for a lot of people.