It seems as though nearly everyone has a personal blog, and genealogists are no exception. All bloggers, no matter what their subject matter, need to be careful of things like copyright law and proper attribution. Think before you publish that blog post for the entire internet to see. You might be doing it wrong!
Some will use their blog as a way to tell a story about the interesting things they discovered while doing genealogy research. Other genealogists want to use their blog as a place to collect information about their ancestors. It’s fine to tell your own stories about the projects you are working on. However, if you are copying information from another website, and dropping it into your blog, then you are doing it wrong!
Be a blogger, not a splogger. A splog is a website, (or a blog), that is created by stealing the content that appears on other blogs, word for word, in order to have content for their own blog. The phase puts the word “spam” and the word “blog” together.
Many splogs are created as a way to generate page clicks, which might earn the person who made the splog some money. Splogs are the cheetos of the blogging world. Oh, sure, at first it may look like exactly what you want. But later, you realize that you didn’t actually get anything of value from that website you read, after all.
To avoid this, don’t copy pages of information into your blog. Write a sentence or two about an article you liked, and then link to it. Don’t put too many links into one blog, or it will start to look like one of those splogs that is nothing more than links. If you cannot come up with your own, original, content for your genealogy blog, then you are doing it wrong!
People who take the time to set up a wordpress blog, make a name for it, and choose the design, may feel as though this blog is just for them, alone, to see. This is entirely untrue! There have been a lot of people who have run into problems after posting things that were probably too personal to display on a blog. You never really know, for sure, who is reading your blog.
If you are filling your blog with information that is too personal to tell strangers, then you are doing it wrong! Genealogists may be tempted to list out the exact dates of their ancestor’s birthday, and day of death, and this might be ok if the ancestor died one hundred years ago. However, listing the exact birthday, and the maiden name, of relatives who are alive today could lead to problems with identity theft.
Blogs tend to look more attractive when you add a photo or image to them. If you are pulling images from random places on the internet, and sticking them on your blog, then you are doing it wrong! You should only be using images that are creative commons. You should also be noting, somewhere on that blog page, who the person was that owns the image.
Image by elchicogris on Flickr