A friend sent me an email earlier today asking me to take a look at a new video blog he just posted on his site. His words were, “I think I finally came up with something remarkable. This will be huge.” I was intrigued, so I jumped on his blog to watch the video. The clip was about 10 minutes long, an amount of time I only give to online videos form Guy Kawasaki. But sure, why not, what are friends for after all? The video starts with my friend talking about a new term he coined and I can tell how excited he is about it. I watched the first 3 minutes. He was just talking about how great the new term is. The next 5 minutes went by and he continued talking about how important the term is because it helps explain the benefits of blogging. And the last two minutes of the blog went on as my friend continued to talk about how important the term is. Confused? Well you’re not the only one! And I am almost sure that my friend shares the same level of confusion.

This got me thinking. The chasm between my friends’ excitement versus the reality of his video blog is scary. He thought he came up with the next big thing and I thought that, well, his idea and his video blog stunk! Leave the issue of me having to tell him that, or maybe him reading this blog to find out what I thought. But how many times do we write pieces that we pour our hearts into, yet they are poorly received? Why is that? Is it because we did not find the right audience? Or is it that most of the time the material presented flat out stinks. Is that too harsh of a word to use? Maybe it is. I can only hope that anyone who takes blogging seriously will publish content they are proud of. But that is not the point. What if you do publish good quality content but your visitors do not think much of it?

On the opposite end of the spectrum you present pieces that have not received much attention and investment from you, yet they gain popularity. When Chris Denny wrote a post about a website having charisma, I thought the piece was very average and would not get much attention. Let’s just say the public proved me very wrong! The piece was one of our most popular blogs we published on the site. We were very close to hitting the first page of digg with it. So in that case, my opinion of the piece is what really stunk, or did it? I sometimes read a blog for an A-blogger and find very little value in it. As a matter of fact I just started cleaning my RSS reader yesterday since some of the blog did not give me any value.

How do you know if your blog stinks?

This is the next question that came to my mind. What if people are NOT thinking too highly of your blog but no one really cares enough to actually say that. So here is my suggestion: it is time to come up with a way to measure how much a blog stinks! I will leave that to my next blog but before get into that, I wanted to hear from you what they think. How do you measure the “smell” and success of a blog? What makes a blog “stink?”