*If you are doing ordinary/general food, you need to document in a wonderful way.
You can make something simple if you have beautiful photos and thoughtfully written head notes that sell the post. Smitten Kitchen has great process photos, some that might really help beginning cooks. Another blogger, Sassy Radish did something very creative recently to demonstrate what pie dough looks like when it’s ready to chill, to prevent overworking it, and took a photo of it pinched together, with the rest of the un-pinched dough in the background. I hadn’t seen that in a cookbook before, and while the “pinched together” instruction is always there, sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Online media allows you to show more visually, and blog authors should take full advantage.
Even if someone with excellent writing will not keep me as a reader if their photos are terrible, because I just cannot stand to to look at the site. While no photos is bad if you are trying to convince someone to make your recipe, I would venture to say that no photos is better than terrible photos.
ALL that said, I think photos can be overused and one of the excellent things about Smitten Kitchen is the photo collage of the process/intermediate steps of a dish – so not all the photos are large, but there is always at least one large one to draw the reader in.

Do you eat Chinese, for example, or shrimp, or chicken, or fish in your favorite neighborhood joint? It’s likely they too are serving factory eggs and shrimp from Thailand. So seems to me the first blogger is commenting on taste, and Philpot is commenting on the evolution of food in our country and what is wrong with it. A worthy argument none the less, and perhaps that is why his blog is always so interesting! I would like him to comment more on Salmon as I’m super against it, but there are evidently sustainable salmon farms sprouting up, as there are also sustainable shrimp operations; we just don’t hear much about them.

All that aside–David’s blog is always fun and he certainly knows how to draw in the crowds. I have never cooked from his blog, and sometimes (sorry), tire of all the ranting. I would say that there are many “general” blogs out there, or at least ones that started out that way, and it’s perhaps the fact that they have managed to draw an audience (whether it be because of voice, connections, good photography, interesting stories, good recipes, etc) that I think effectively makes them appealing to the masses. Take 101 cookbooks for example–though her blog started out as a documentation of cookbooks, she is basically writing about what she has eaten that day. She just happens to do it very well.

I read through a lot of food blogs, and I’m also a fan of both Philpott and Lebovitz, less a fan of the general interest home cooking sites. I think what draws me is a voice, a personality, a story, and a discussion that informs me, entertains me, and/or makes me think. I always enjoyed Gluten-Free Girl’s blog, for instance, even though I don’t have celiac disease, because she is such a lovely storyteller, and writes so brilliantly about the experience of eating, period. It’s universal, not a niche. And, yet, I also quite like niche blogs that inform me about my own niche interests, like Marisa McClellan’s “Food In Jars” canning blog.

Thanks for writing. What I was getting at is that it’s already challenging to make people interested in the topic of what you did today, because you’re not generating news in the traditional manner (ex. you robbed a bank or gave birth to octuplets). You’re cooking, baking, going to a restaurant, or relating the details of your life. That’s one challenge. The next is that writing about your ordinary day has to engage the reader in an extraordinary way. Not many writers know how to do that. It requires mastery of so many elements: voice, content, knowledge of subject, photography, etc. You’ve given some good examples of bloggers who succeed.

Re failing, I meant that most food blogs fail to engage me (and others). I wasn’t talking about whether they are a commercial success.

5 Second Rule[http://www.5secondrule.typepad.com/] has great photos and mouth-watering recipes, but her hook is always so unique I can’t wait to read her lede. I always feel something.

The blogs I don’t return to? Those without a voice.

I agree with Tone Victoria about David Lebovitz. I strive to be like him — but in my own disaster-prone way.