Joi Ito shares ancient Japanese blogging wisdom! This is good stuff!

Joi Ito codifies five great tips for people who take their blogging seriously. I find it fascinating when really smart people, like Joi, can explain in just a few words what I’ve been struggling to understand for a while. While my thoughts have been circling around the themes that Joi points out, I’d never had the kind of clarity I needed to really act on the ideas until reading what he wrote.

I’d like to try and summarize his five points in my own words, just to see if you all think I understood them correctly. It’ll also help me better internalize his suggestions, which I wholly agree with. Points 1 and 2 both remind us that everyone likes to feel smart about something; let your audience feel smart about something and they’ll gladly share their smarts with you. Point 3 tells us to not just be a talking head; be a real person, with your own beliefs and opinions, because it’s okay to be a person, because that’s what blog readers are looking for. Point 4 is the old lesson of “give, and you shall receive” from the Bible (Luke 6:38). Point 5 says that frequency is important, more important than being right or being complete sometimes.

I urge folks who, like me, are serious about their blogging to look over Joi’s entry (and the rest of his blog — he’s a great writer and has a long legacy of being at the core of lots of Internet ventures, and offers lots of wisdom from that perspective, too) and tell me whether you think I understood his points or not. Thanks!