Jakob Nielsen has a list of dos and don'ts for blog authors. Some of them matter more than others, and some depend a lot on the context of your blogging. For instance - the "own your own domain name" one.

That depends on what you are trying to accomplish. Me? I'm evangelizing Cincom Smalltalk (and ranting about things in the industry that cross my view). Given the evangelism aspect, it makes sense more me to be blogging on a Cincom server - my goal is to build the Smalltalk community. How important the domain is depends a lot on your goals.

Another one of his suggestions popped at me as problematic as well:

Many weblog authors seem to think it's cool to write link anchors like: "some people think" or "there's more here and here." Remember one of the basics of the Web: Life is too short to click on an unknown. Tell people where they're going and what they'll find at the other end of the link.

You have to "go with the flow" of blogging on this one. An awful lot (most) of what is written on blogs is extremely temporal - it's very much based in the now. Which means that for the person reading about the latest kerfuffle (technical, political, whatever) - they get the context. It's very unlikely that anyone will care that deeply in a month, much less a few years.

Much of the rest of what he wrote is good stuff though - have a look, and see what you think. In this area, it's definitely a YMMV thing.