Ponder your genre

Cyberspace contains a world of possibility. Three former PayPal employees followed a hunch in 2005. A year later, Google bought the video-sharing platform YouTube for US$1.65 billion. Not only did they tap the mix-tape pirate in us all, they gave expression to our secret karaoke dreams.

However, mere mortals can't all be the next Steve Chen, Chad Hurley or Jawed Karim (YouTube's founding triumvirate). If you're not burning with the Next Big Idea, consider the blogosphere's proven formulas and how your ambitions fit into 'em.

I encourage you to read (and readreadREAD) some of these links, even those not directly relevant to your topic. A sampling will cue you into what tones and tricks work where.

Advice – This genre extends from tips (CleanTech) to troubleshooting (NTHell) and talk about dating (Miss Information). Gluten-free Girl explains how she found a healthier diet ... and true love and a book deal! I am Fuel, You Are Friends reveals hip new music. And the hero of all journalism coaches – Roy Peter Clark – cheerleads authors with his Writing Tools. Tech-information clearing-houses like Slashdot and Gizmodo and their ilk also fall into this realm.

Entertainment – Just like it sounds, this type of blog aims to brighten readers' days. It's the online equivalent of the newspaper's Lifestyle section. Enjoy silliness from Jezebel's fashion and feminism to The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs (fake, but done so well Apple's maestro reads it). Boing Boing's another great example. You could survive without it, sure, but that curated collection of weird certainly amuses...

Dear diary – A journal-type blog opens a window on the writer's world – or some aspect of it, like Jess Thomson's recipe-a-day project for Hogwash. Tom Reynolds kept a blog of his life as an East London Emergency Medical Technician. He eventually landed a book, as did Mimi Smartypants, who relates her Chicago EL squabbles and pious-mom chat-room smackdowns brilliantly.

Gossip – Lean over the virtual back fence and swap tales. Postsecret is a user-generated art project, where readers submit revealing, anonymous, homemade postcards. On the opposite end of the spectrum is that vile, yet insanely successful, celebrity slasher Perez Hilton and offerings like Pittwatch.com. Sneer all you want (I certainly do), but then take a sobering look at Technorati's top search terms tonight: Jennifer Garner (4), Paris Hilton (8), Jennifer Aniston (9) and Vanessa Minnillo (10). Many newspapers and magazines process off-cuts, funny asides and spats with readers. Two examples from Seattle, where Mike and I live. The Slog and the P-I's Big Blog. Sites like these can provide rich pickings for other bloggers to comment upon, since the professional group-authored
sites draw upon a lot of talent. They're hard to compete with, however, for the same reason.

Political – The Huffington Post is the hardest hitter with a stable of columnists, along with Daily Kos. But school-less fish swim in this sea too, like Wonkette and my friend Candace Dempsey. Her blog coverage of the Perugia murder trial led to a book deal with Berkley (a

Penguin imprint). She's also suffered death threats and smear campaigns for her original reporting. Dempsey's dealing with all the hassle that investigative reporters suffer without the support of a newsroom: legal, financial and emotional. Tough stuff.

Freakonomics tackles money matters and "the hidden side of everything". Gary Becker,

the Nobel-winning economist, teams up with Richard Posner, the prominent US judge and legal theorist, to pontificate here. Heavy hitters like Newsweek also weigh in to the political debate online, often supplying material not found in the print magazine.

Promotional – Blogs can draw awareness to a brand, both by creating a community (and buzz), as well as placing fresh content on a corporate site. This helps improve search engine results (SEO). Marketing bods are in a feeding frenzy over fresh content recently and how to capture the new blog/social networking zeitgeist.

Amazon (predictably) gets the tempo right. But with a fleet of talented editors on hand and some

of the best market intel, is that so surprising? General Motors tries hard, but often draws fire for unhip blunders like censoring its comments during controversies. Here's a small British fabrication shop making it work. It's tone is cheeky, like this post, beginning: "Three minutes away you were from having the pleasure of me videoing myself doing a naked umbaba round my back garden in the snow." It's appealing precisely because the author isn't being all starchy and spinning PR puff.

Literary – Blogs can serve as a promotional platform for existing or future books (nothing persuades a publisher like a guaranteed rapt audience). Fellow blog instructor

Rebecca Agiewich scored her first novel deal, Breakup Babe, after chronicling her dating life online. She retired breakupbabe.blogspot.com when she realized the confessional wasn't helping said dating life. Now she keeps a less revealing diary at Sparkly, Sparkly.

Working the other end of the spectrum, Michelle Goodman's blog complements and promotes her books The Anti 9-to-5 Guide and My So-Called Freelance Life. She also taught me the admirable trick of "cheating" a book website in WordPress (its templates allow for those

nifty header-bar navigation tabs: they look less bloggy to my eye...). In a few hours, I whipped ones up for anthologies to which I contributed: Single State of the Union and Greece A Love Story.

I paid Wordpress $15 for one year's worth of domain-name goodness (http://greecealovestory.com) in spring 2007. I only received my second (ignored) renewal notice a few months back: yet the site functions. We'll see if my luck holds...

Venting – Everyone loves a good rant – and the Internet thrives on this. Rat and Mouse allows unhappy home owners to vent their spleens. WalMart Watch takes on the megastore chain for "selling Nazi t-shirts" and other offenses. One complaint from new media watchdog Jim Jarvis was enough to persuade Dell to review its customer service policy. Sometimes the squeaky wheel really does get the oil...

Did I leave any genres out? Oh yeah, porn and cats. I'll give Icanhascheezburger.com a nod and leave it at that.

Cartoon by Shannon Wheeler, author of Too Much Coffee Man