This week the Gawker Media flagship blog offered some tongue-in-cheek but nevertheless sage blogging advice to their boss/new co-worker Nick Denton:
When all else fails, never underestimate the power of a screengrab to masquerade as actual content. It’s quick, it’s easy, and requires little effort on your part.
It’s true: Screen grabs — a.k.a. screen shots and screen caps — are the perfect complement to almost any under-developed blog post. In addition to the virtues listed above, screen captures are often intriguing, revelatory, even thought-provoking. At a bare minimum, they can add a dash of color to a gray block of text (which you may have borrowed from the very same website). Of course, since Blog P.I. is largely devoted to covering other websites, I’m pretty sure we’ve got more justification than most.
More seriously, if there is any downside to using screen shots — other than overusing them, of course — it might be that they undermine your ability to drive traffic to the sites you’ve linked (not that Blog P.I. drives much traffic). Why should readers bother following the link if you’ve already shown them what you’re talking about?
That said, there are many good uses of screen shots: to capture a moment in time, whether an embarrassment soon to be erased or merely a page you know will not be archived; to focus on a small area on the page; to show something that is not on the World Wide Web.
So let’s hear it for the screen shot — the underused and underestimated shortcut of meta-bloggers everywhere.
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