Story Tagged Blog Etiquette

The most important thing to remember when posting a story-tagged blog is the intent of the feature. The story tag feature is intended to let you inform readers about things relevant to the story. It is not intended to let you turn people tracking your story into people following you. If your blog post is not relevant to the story, don't tag the story. That bears repeating: if nothing in your blog post is relevant to the story you tag, it will be considered spam. On top of being impolite, it is a violation of a site rule. Consult Obsolescence's site post, or the FAQ ("Blog Posts" - "How do I tag a story in a blog post?").

From the perspective of a person who has tracked your story but is not following you, the ideal thing to do would be for you to put everything relevant to the story in one blog post and then put all the other stuff into a separate blog post. However, from the perspective of a person who is following you, that could be irritating. So it is understandable that you might want to make one blog post that covers everything.

Fine. Just please follow these two rules:

1) Name the story somewhere in the first paragraph. Actually, this is nice to do even if the blog post contains nothing but story-relevant information. On the feed page, there is no indication that a blog post is even story tagged, let alone what story it is tagged with. A blog post should be fully understandable from the feed page. The only reason it should need to be opened fully (its own tab, or leaving feed to go to the post) is to comment on it (or to get to the story in question if you don't link the name, which is fine). Some people prefer to read blog posts in their own tab, some prefer to read them without leaving the feed page. You can easily accommodate both by simply naming the story you're talking about.

2) Put the story-relevant content first. This is helpful on the feed page and the blog page, in that it lets the people following the story find the relevant bits faster. It's easy to scroll past irrelevant content when it comes after the content you're interested in. However, if it comes before, or in the middle (if nothing else, please don't do that), the reader has to go slowly enough to at least skim everything to spot the relevant content.

I'm going to link a few example blogs from V-Pony. Not to single him out, but rather because he's been on both extremes. This is a very good use of a story-tagged post. The videos are irrelevant, but at the bottom of the post and clearly skippable. The story is named up front, and almost all of the post is story related. This is a bad post. It is about four-fifths irrelevant content, almost all of which is above the story-related content. The story isn't named at all.

Fine, teal deer. Here it is in a nutshell: if you story-tag a blog, some people reading that blog only care about the story and nothing else. Identify the story, and put everything relevant at the top.