What is blogworthy and what is decent content?

I though the two terms above are somewhat related to each other so I’d like to discuss them here. The Ca t asks what makes an issue, news or topic blogworthy? This was in response to her plea to help spread Pyro’s case. I’d like to take the stand of some anonymous blogger and venture an answer or two to The Cat’s question:

• First, blogworthiness is a relative term. One topic might be blogworthy for me but it might not be blogworthy to others.
• Topic relevance. If I have a blog about travel, it would be a little awkward to have a post similar to what I did here. If the topic was relevant to travelling, it would make sense to post about it on the travel blog. Otherwise, it’s not blogworthy at all.
• Too personal. Yup, some subjects are just too personal to blog about.
• Blogger Relationships. A lot of bloggers have now formed close relationships on top of just being fellow bloggers online. Others become true friends, ninongs or ninangs, maybe even as significant others. Still the general populace of the blogosphere is still a little diluted in terms of personal relationships that a request like this might not strike favorably and be deemed not worth a space in their blog.

Then, there’s this “what’s in it for me” mentality everyone has (including me).

So, we move forward to what makes decent content and who determines if it’s decent or not? I was just chatting with Mikey and told him that one of the bloggers in their upcoming content network had mistaken me as the organizer (the entry has since then been edited). I wanted to correct the blogger right away but I thought the organizers of Dash Media were either doing this in stealth mode until I found the link of their email here.

First, let me clarify that I was never a part of Dash Media (and never will be, although we host the site on one of our servers). Second, I have been brewing a Filipino blog network of my own for the longest time (say December 2005?). We haven’t launched it yet due to logistical problems. In as far as marking it as the first Filipino blog network, Shai Coggins has already taken that spot a long time ago with her About Weblogs (which was consequently merged with b5media).

The vision of Dash Media is to become the 9rules of the Philippine Blogosphere, which is why they are filtering the good blogs from the not-so-decent ones. It’s like PinoyBlog for those who can write decent and have a decent design as well. I wouldn’t call it an elitist network as some of the western bloggers would refer to 9Rules but I’d like to stretch the discussion on where to draw the line between a decent blog and a noisy blog (noisy, being not decently written). You will notice I am using the word decent as this was the same term used by Dash Media to draw the line between a blog that’s worthy to be added to your Bloglines account and a blog that’s just plain boring and uninteresting.

I believe the regular Filipino blog reader is intelligent enough to know which is good content and which is not. This is the reason why most of us have RSS Feed readers — it serves as our personal filter to weed out the noise from the ever growing blogosphere. My other worry is that this could cause some sort division as to who has the better content.

Ok, I’ll stop here before people thinks this is another “my network versus your network” thing, which isn’t because I don’t have one yet. :D