Blogging ethics and guidelines

While much of the guidelines for blogging that were given in this weeks readings seemed to fall within the realm of common sense, there were several in the first article, "Blogging Strategy 101: A Primer", that I found quite interesting. One such guideline that seems quite obvious in retrospect, is the idea of laying out a plan for the blog. I'd not really thought about the need to plan out the publishing schedule, the topics that will be covered and those that won't, etc. I just sort of thought of blogs as something that one starts up and populates with whatever content seems relevant at the moment.
Another guideline that would not have occurred to me, but is unarguably important is the strategic deployment of keywords. New readers are most likely going to be won via search engine results, so it only makes sense to have useful keywords appear in headlines and the body of posts so that they will be appropriately indexed by search engines.
Aside from these points, most of the others were not new to me. Ideas such as transparency and honesty should be at the forefront of the thoughts of all writers, regardless of their medium. Citation is easier than ever in a blog (simply provide a link to the source document, assuming that it is online) so there is no reason to skirk this duty.

In regards to the case studies, there were some very good blogs and some that I found lacking in several areas. The blog that seems most in need of improvement is the St. Joseph County Public Library GameBlog. The first thing I noticed about this blog was a posting headline that reads: "Say wha?," which completely obliterates the concept of keyword placement, given that the post has nothing to do with saying anything nor anything to do with "wha." Now, I realize that this is a blog aimed at a young audience, and that this particular post is simply a funny picture of a cat posed with a Nintendo DS lite, so I ought not to be too critical of it. However, there are other poorly titled posts, such as "The Results are In..." that do not in any way describe to the reader what results are in and would not be of any use in appropriately indexing this post in a search engine.
Another complaint I have about this blog is that there seems to be no rhyme or reason to the publishing schedule. There are some days that have multiple posts and then there are several weeks that go by between posts. One final complaint is that the author pages are scant in detail. The author photos are highly edited with effects that largely obscure the images (for reasons why this might be bad, consult Jakob Neilsen's "Weblog Usability") and there is little information that would help the reader feel any connection with the author.