how do I make the intern read my blog?

This may be a more relevant question than you think. Consider this -- for the past week or so, I have been trying to figure out a good way for our ethics office to keep track of blogs kept by doctors, bioethicists, health lawyers, and other sources. There are hundreds of these, and the people in charge will really only want to read a handful. And the choice has more or less fallen on me. This isn't due to any particular expertise, but basically because I am the youngest person in the office and, as a result, more familiar with resources like Bloglines.

When you think about it, this situation must be repeated time and again in American corporations. Because of stories like the fall of Trent Lott, Howard Dean's campagin, "Rathergate" and the Downing Street Memo, many professional people have now heard of blogs. But most of them have no desire to read them, or when they try, feel completely lost. So it falls on the younger staff members to create some way of getting the information to them (in our case, through a group Bloglines account I'm putting together). Note to Graham, if you're reading -- this might be a story.

So what sort of criteria does one use to quickly evaluate the utility of more than a hundred blogs? Here's what developed as I was poking around:

* if you haven't posted in the past month, you're probably not worth reading.
* personal anecdotes or announcements make your blog much less palatable to the bosses, who are slow to buy into this medium anyway. The same thing goes for animation, cute graphics, and other things that make Web sites annoying. However, the occasional photo might help.
* links, in themselves, are not that useful, particularly to people whose job it is to know the news anyway. Collecting links in a useful way is good, but the thing people need most is insightful commentary, which they can't always get from the newspaper.
* large blocks of text are a big turn-off, especially for people who have never encountered the medium before.
* a niche will get you noticed. Generic blogs by doctors eventually became so repetitive that I got tired of including them in our list. But a blog that focuses on a speciality or issue is a resource to people doing research in that area.
* as a rule of thumb: the more political, the less useful. Even if a blog contains great information on, say, stem cell reserach, it's hard for me to designate it as one of our official sources when it also includes long screeds against creeping socialism.
* obscenity poses a similar problem -- if every fifth post is a sex joke, it's difficult for me to send a blog around the office.
* using a generic blogging service (like Blogspot) versus having your own site doesn't seem to matter much, especially when we're reading over RSS.
* I didn't give a lot of consideration to a blog's current popularity among other bloggers, since I knew the higher-ups would never know or care.

Of course, these aren't guidelines I would use to judge *all* blogs (that would obviously be hypocritical, given some of the weird things I've posted here). The point is that if you want your blog to be picked up in the sort of search I just did (and which interns around the country are probably also doing), they might be some things to consider.