October 21st, 2007
by

Where’d he go?

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Haven’t been blog­ging lately as you can see. The prob­lem hasn’t been lack of moti­va­tion — in fact, it’s really been over-motivation. The fact is that I’m very inter­ested in writ­ing on a whole bunch of top­ics — pho­tog­ra­phy, film, cre­ativ­ity, busi­ness, star­tups, pol­i­tics, geek­ery, graphic design & typog­ra­phy, his­tory of poly­maths, fic­ti­tious ora­tory, and sev­eral other things. The trou­ble is, these don’t all fit under the roof of “Artistic Whim” any more. Thus, the dilemma — to have one sin­gle blog that I can blather about any­thing, or to have lots of lit­tle blogs focused on one topic.
Conventional web wis­dom says that hav­ing a clear, fixed focus helps build read­er­ship more quickly as it’s easy for read­ers to fig­ure out what to expect. That puts the bur­den on me to cat­e­go­rize my thoughts a pri­ori, and to tune the post for the par­tic­u­lar blog it’ll land on. That gets sticky when a post really fits many cat­e­gories. Do I cross-post it to sev­eral blogs? Or just post it to the most applic­a­ble blog, then post a few “hey look over there at my other blog” posts else­where?
On the other hand, hav­ing a sin­gle blog is really con­ve­nient for me — I write posts off the top of my head, then tag them with a whole slew of cat­e­gories. Such a diverse blog might also help attract other diversely diverted peo­ple like myself. It’s also more con­ve­nient for friends & fam­ily who want to keep up with all my antics and don’t want to track a dozen blogs. On the other hand, being filled with ran­dom top­ics, a kitchen sink blog is unlikely to grow read­er­ship.
Any suggestions?

~ End Article and Begin Conversation ~

  • November 17th, 2007
    by Laurie

    1

    Well, almost all of your sub­jects sound either artis­tic or some­what whim­si­cal, so I’d say they do fall under the Artistic Whim umbrella. You gotta be allowed to go off on a few whims, after all. Every good blog throws in a lit­tle diver­sity, so we can get to know the com­pli­cated human being behind the tar­geted blog. They wouldn’t be much fun with­out it. Take a look at some of your favorites, a theme yes, but occa­sional per­sonal diver­sions allowed (and, I think, wel­comed by read­ers). I vote for keep­ing it all on one blog. (But then I’m one of those friends that likes hav­ing you all in one place.) ;)

  • November 18th, 2007
    by Rob

    2

    Thanks for the ideas! Right now I’m lean­ing towards keep­ing this my main, per­sonal blog and doing spin­offs for spe­cific top­ics if it makes sense. That said, I’m going to keep impul­siveg­eek­ery as the home for all things tech, inter­net, busi­ness, and the ger­man blog because it seems weird hav­ing a mix of lan­guages in one blog.
    But, you do give me an idea: maybe a con­sol­i­dated RSS feed for all things Rob.

  • January 1st, 2008
    by Alex

    3

    I think it’s bet­ter to have one blog and use good tag­ging. If folks only want to read about one aspect of what you are think­ing about then they can sub­scribe to a spe­cific tag (most blog soft­ware pro­vides per-tag RSS feeds). People aren’t one dimen­sional and their per­sonal blogs shouldn’t be either.

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