[I'm going to preface this post by telling everyone that I'm borderline OCD about spelling and grammar (for the most part... if I'm writing my mom and have three seconds, I may just plow through)]

I’m a big (big) information taker-inner (news, blogs, etc etc).  Which means I read a lot.  A lot of what I read comes in the form of blogs: mostly individuals who have put up their blog posts, which haven’t gone through an editorial board or the several rounds of edits you might do for a graduate paper or something like that.

So, despite the fact that I’m somewhat picky about spelling and grammar (grammar a little less so, but only a little less), I really try to keep this fact in mind, and also give people the benefit of the doubt that they’re using this as a form of personal expression and that maybe they’re more focused on the ideas than the spelling etc etc.

[Despite my leniency on the issue, that is stretching it.  Or, at least I'd want to personally express myself as a good speller.  I wuldn't want to peronally expres myself like ths. it just loks like I tpyed to fast. Anyway, I do try to gloss over these things in a search for good content.]

However, there’s a point at which you HAVE to edit, or you’re actually doing yourself some damage (more than your personal reputation).  I’m going to use Jeremiah Owyang as an example.

Firstly, I am a BIG fan of Jeremiah. For those of you don’t know him, he’s a former analyst for Forrester Research, he’s now a strategy consultant for the Altimeter Group.   I read his posts all the time, constantly share them with people and constantly point people to his blog.  I think almost every one of his posts has been chock full o’ value, data and real insight.

However…..he types too fast.

WAY too fast.

Sometimes I have to stop myself from twitching and focus on the content (remember, the twitching only comes because of my minor OCD on this issue).  He has a lot of errors in his typing.  I know it’s not because he can’t spell… it’s probably because he has a ton on his plate, he wants to blog, but he only a *teensy* window of time to do so.

But, sometimes it can come back to bite you.  Somewhere in the Twittersphere I came across his post from January that had a collection of social network stats for 2009 (An awesome post, check out some of the stats on there, thanks for compiling it!).

The title reads:

Great, but the LINK (Important!) is the following:

Oops!  What I’m guessing happened is that he plowed through the title, misspelled it, maybe noticed it on the way out, but forgot to change the permalink.

Now, I’m not trying to call out Jeremiah on this one (although, Jeremiah, if you read this, I would totally love for you to start rereading your blog posts…. I’d offer myself as your editor but that can be a big job). A lot of people do this.  Is one broken or off link going to hurt him?  No, he’s got a lot of stuff out there.  But if this became a regular thing, it could be very damaging.  It comes right down to SEO.  And for someone just building their online presence, it wouldn’t be a good way to start.

So, while your blog post bodies aren’t crucial to edit (although highly advised) slowing down in general and making sure you’ve literally dotted your “i”s and crossed your “t”s will save you from situations like this.

And I’ll end by saying one last time that editing is NEVER a bad thing (I’m probably going to reread this post about 8 times now just because….).