Guidance

I was reading posts from other bloggers a while ago. Some of the posts I read were good, some were just downright lazy and some were boring. During the course of my reading, I was thinking of the reason what makes a post boring…and then it hit me.

Go grab a pencil and paper cuz here comes…….

Don't ask why it is in flames.

Let’s say you are visiting a blog, and you stumble upon a long post - a goddamn long one. Normally this would result in one out of two scenarios:

Scenario A, the good scenario, is when the reader reads the post. This is normally because the reader has a special interest to the particular blogger or the topic of the post.

Scenario B, the bad scenario, is when the reader simply ignores the post. Why? Long posts tend to get boring as you read it and not all of us have sufficient attention span to continue on reading a predictable and typical post. What do I mean by that? THE BLOGGING PRINCIPLE: One blogs only about oneself to interest others. So it is predictable that the post will be going to be about the author and since you know what the post will be about it is ok to skip it.

But never fear my fellow unfortunate long-post bloggers, I will bestow upon you blogging knowledge that is…

THE HARALAMBOS RULE (No, I did not made this up)

The Haralambos rule states a long post will have less chance to be ignored if there a more pictures in it.

Here’s a graph to illustrate the Haralambos rule.

poorly made, but effectively explained

The y-axis corresponds to the number of pictures put in the post and the x-axis corresponds to the length of the post. The ‘interest line’ indicates whether you’re post is interesting or not. Your post needs to be above the interest line to be interesting, thus the interesting zone, and if it is under the interest line in other words in the boring zone, your post is boring. Let’s take point A for instance, if your post is THAT long so it has to have THAT many pictures to make it interesting. For point B, if your post is THAT long but you have THAT many pictures then it is a boring post.

According to the Haralambos rule, to have an interesting post, your post needs to have a picture after 3 – 4 paragraphs.

Happy blogging people. =)