The death of the (boring) blog post Options

[mipadi]

I found this interesting article that discusses the concept of a "blogazine". The central idea is that a blog is laid out more like a magazine, so the layout of each post changes to match the content of the post. I found it interesting because I'm considering launching a new site in the coming months that will feature a more journalistic-style of writing, and I'm thinking of taking this layout route.

One of the writers/designers discussed was Jason Santa Maria, who has a pretty interesting blog, both in terms of content and layout. Here are some examples:



Another one I liked was Dustin Curtis, whose work looks like this:



There was one quote that stood out to me in the article:

What if a print magazine used the same template for every article? It would be pretty boring, no?

What do you think? Should a blog post look the same on every page, or should each post be styled appropriately?

[mipadi]

I think the article's discussion about "long" blog posts is interesting. As a kid, I always hoped to be able to make a living as a writer, possibly for a magazine or newspaper. Unfortunately, I was born about 10-20 years too late, and print journalism is on its way out. But I don't think our online media has really filled the gap. Blogging showed promise, but I think it's turned into a medium in which "shorter is better" and people tend to regurgitate almost every thought they have, without really thinking about it. For personal blogging, that's okay; but I think that more "professional", informative, "journalistic" blogging requires a bit more thought. I think that professional bloggers should put the same time and effort that they'd put into writing for a print publication into their online writing. And I think that the Twitter model of posting a thought in a constrained, 140-character limit, or the Tumblr-style blogging of reposting the content of others, lacks some importance and relevance. I think the "blogazine" format is a good way to bring the professionalism of print publications into the online sphere.