PCMAG.com offers some tips from Gawker blogger Nick Douglas on launching a successful blog, from choosing a platform to landing a book deal. Douglas edited the Silicon Valley gossip blog Valleywag in 2006 and that blog is part of Gawker’s empire. Among the tips:

• “Revel in weird topics. Look at these guys who love beards, or the cheese hounds at CurdNerds. These blogs are so much more fun to read than some guy reporting cell-phone news.”
• “And if you just provide links with summaries, they click one of those links and never come back. To become a source worth coming back to, you must either provide more and better links than everyone else (and you can’t beat a Google News search at that) or write original stories.”
• “Give yourself a year to learn how to blog. You will be wrong a lot, and with any luck people will yell at you every time.”