Valleywag has a good observation: it’s hard to get the spelling of many web companies right. There are some good reminders.

Yahoo! has an exclamation point.

I think eBay should always be eBay, even if it’s at the start of a sentence (doesn’t the sentence “ITunes is the best audio player” just look wrong?).

Really watch when a company does a mix of capital letters and lower case. Apple is pretty easy because they always do a lowercase “i” and then a capital word: iTunes. iBook. iMac. But watch out for MacBook. This can get tricky: I almost typed ValleyWag, for example. When in doubt, it’s worth the extra effort to check. But sometimes it’s hard: TechCrunch says “TechCrunch” in their header image, but in the title bar, sometimes it says “Techcrunch.” I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be TechCrunch since that’s what is says on their About page.

Acronyms are better just as “RSS” not with periods “R.S.S.” (looks like the name of a navy) and “H.T.M.L.” would just be terrible.

I’m also trying to use the spell-check ability right in WordPress to catch some more egregious mistakes. A misspelled word shows up with a red, dotted underline and you can just right-click to get a suggestion.

Consistency is pretty important, especially when you consider people searching for stuff on your blog (or eventually via search engines) are going to have a much harder time if you make even the most minor of spelling errors, or even worse, if stuff is spelled one way in some blog posts and then it changes for others. At the very least, consistently “wrong” is better than oscillating between spelling variations.

What this eventually points to is the necessity of a personal style guide of sorts for your blog. I’m slowly piecing together little guidelines.

I do serial commas “this, this, and this.”

I use a hyphen rather than an emdash.

Quotes are always straight, and punctuation goes inside.

Parentheses don’t contain final punctuation.

URL titles I try to do the name of the website and then the title of the article (TechCrunch: About TechCrunch”).

I’m also drilling down to when to use italic vs. bold and adding some consistency to my movie reviews (large image, cast, director, etc.).

It’s a pain, but hopefully the consistency adds some polish to what could easily devolve into just another ridiculous blog.

Disclosure: I own a tiny amount of Apple stock.

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