Keep the home court advantage

"Write what you know" is the oldest advice in the trade – for a reason. Your unique life experiences will always illuminate your prose: more so when you’re enjoying the home court advantage. Try to pick topics that exploit your expertise. For example, when I wrote a piece on driving a moped in Rome, where I lived for two years, I didn’t just bemoan the manic Mediterranean traffic: I introduced the Italian concept – menefreghismo, the "state of not caring" – that fuels some of their wild driving habits. Such wealth of detail is hard to come by without being there, saturating in your subject, living it.

Writers bring much of themselves to any text. An advertising executive in Taiwan has quite a different perspective from a Denver mountaineer or a French homemaker. Even if all three blogged the same topic, their responses would be diverse. And that's the beauty of the web, really. With great ease, we can explore others' experiences and reactions ... satisfying that primal human urge to rubberneck. Dangerous as that can be, we're hardwired to learn through observation. Happily the information highway is a safer place to looky-loo.

Don’t parrot or “echo chamber,” as the blogosphere calls it. Jeff Atwood sagely points out: “we have the whole of human history to talk about, and most people can't get past what happened today. If I wanted news, I'd visit one of the hundreds of news sites that do nothing but news every day. Putting yourself in the news business is a thankless, unending grind. Don't do it.”