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I've been waging a lowkey campaign to convince Slashdot to compile a styleguide for writing blurbs, but I still get modded way down for this, so I guess I'll post my own...
Very briefly, my main points are:
In the world of printed media (eg magazines and newspapers), blurbs and headlines are almost always written as 'teasers' whose purpose is to get you to buy the paper or turn to the article, to find out more. But very often the teaser turns out to have been misleading, trying to make a dull article sound juicier than it really is.
Slashdot blurbs should never ever be guilty of this! (If they are, the Slashdot editors should add a clarifying comment.) For example if it's a product review, state right upfront whether it's positive or negative.
A basic rule-of-thumb for writing hypertext is that you never want to mislead your reader about where a link leads, so you should normally try to give a concise summary of the target page. If this spares the reader from bothering to click the link, that's a good thing.
I think Slashdot's "Nerd Pride" attitude is great, but there's one true stereotype of nerds that I think causes big problems: when a non-technical person asks a nerd a technical question, they often get an answer they can't understand.
This sort of 'autism' shouldn't be a source of pride! Making the effort to be a better teacher is a win-win attitude.
Every linked article is an opportunity for newbies to learn something, but the blurb needs to give a sense of what they can expect to learn about.
So if you're blurbing an article about a piece of software or hardware, don't just mention its name as if everyone-who-matters has already heard of it-- tell at least a little about what it's for and why they should care.
The current style-convention on Slashdot is to write "The Register has an article..." where the first link is to the homepage of the Register's website. There's no reason to include that extra link. And it does a lot more harm than good, because some people will click it accidentally.
If they really want to visit that homepage, they can easily get there indirectly via the article, so leaving out the extra link is painless.
Every so often you'll see "The Register has an article..." which makes the problem worse by forcing people to click the 'wrong' link. If you consistently use 'article' (or 'review', etc) as the anchortext, you're making it doubly explicit that clicking that link leads directly to the article. (I'd like to see the Slashdot editors tweak blurbs that do it wrong.)
Extra links in blurbs should be kept to a minimum, not multiplied for no reason. And when you have a reason to include more than one, it's especially important that each one clearly indicate what sort of page it leads to. If your text doesn't already include the clear words like 'article' or 'review' you can add what I call a 'text button': [theory]
If the resource you're blurbing is anything but plain-old-HTML (eg a PDF file, or a PNG, or a Flash animation, or a RealVideo) it's important to spell that out, because many readers won't want to bother with some media-types.
Even if they could figure out what filetype it is by mousing over the link and doublechecking the URL, it's bad human-factors design to require that extra step.
If you notice the site has popup ads, a warning is also useful, or if it requires registration (for the NY Times, 'reg req' should be enough of an abbreviation). In my weblog I always warn if an article is broken up into many pages, and if a one-page 'printer' version is available I link that instead.
If you're linking a software download, be clear what platform it's for (Linux, Windows, Mac, etc). You're wasting a lot of people's time if you don't.
From the suggestions box (below):
Tim Lord (? I think) has a Slashdot styleguide that covers more-basic issues (and that seems to encourage multiplication of links).
The official FAQ has a short section on style, and one of the editors has a longer explanation of why submissions get rejected.
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