Blogology
Happy New Year!
This morning in the shower I learned a few things about blogs. First, I personally like blogs that are devoted to a single subject area, rather than grab bags that you can't really classify. (Maybe that's because I'm a future librarian and have to classify things. :))
Second, when I read subject-oriented blogs (library blogs, for example), it's ever so slightly annoying when completely non-library-related stuff pops up. I suppose one could call this tangential material -- posts that don't fit with what the blog says it's about. But on the other hand a mostly personal post that somehow works libraries into it is good. (Let me rush to add that I'm not against personal posts at all, as you can no doubt tell by looking through the archives. And I don't think I'm saying that such "tangential material" is bad per se -- just that it's slightly grating against the user experience, that's all. If I'm expecting library stuff, other material usually seems inconsequential.)
Third, I found that I judge a blog by its title (particularly as relevant to the subject I'm interested in). For example, when I'm looking for book blogs, I'm inevitably drawn to the ones that have "Book" in their title. That's the rare case where the subject is commonly part of the title; usually I look for titles that are witty and give promise of good, deep, intelligent discussion.
Having said all that, I'm going to split Top of the Mountains into four blogs later today. ToTM will remain as my forum for religious/philosophical/political discussion. My second blog (and these are all unnamed for now) will be a book/literary blog, covering books (of course), library stuff, writing, C.S. Lewis, and languages. Technology will be the topic of my third blog, with discussions about Macs and programming and web design and stuff like that. Finally, my fourth blog will be about education -- homeschooling, teaching, etc. I haven't really written much about that yet, but I plan to homeschool my future kids and so I want to start studying up on it. So anyway, that's the plan, and I'll put it into effect later today (or early tomorrow morning -- it really depends on how soon I can come up with suitable names for each of these new blogs :)).
And addressing the second issue above, these four blogs (the Fantastic Four, hah! -- I'm kidding, of course) will be subject-specific. That is, they'll stick to their topics and I won't introduce tangential material. I guess that leaves me high and dry with no place to put personal stuff, but that's not really a bad thing. :) (That's what journals are for, right?) Anyway, I think this is the right thing to do and will result in better blogging.
Side note: Googling "blogology" returned 109,000 results; "blogosophy" (which was an alternative I considered as the title of this post) returned 13,600. I guess it's pretty clear which term the people have chosen. :)
This morning in the shower I learned a few things about blogs. First, I personally like blogs that are devoted to a single subject area, rather than grab bags that you can't really classify. (Maybe that's because I'm a future librarian and have to classify things. :))
Second, when I read subject-oriented blogs (library blogs, for example), it's ever so slightly annoying when completely non-library-related stuff pops up. I suppose one could call this tangential material -- posts that don't fit with what the blog says it's about. But on the other hand a mostly personal post that somehow works libraries into it is good. (Let me rush to add that I'm not against personal posts at all, as you can no doubt tell by looking through the archives. And I don't think I'm saying that such "tangential material" is bad per se -- just that it's slightly grating against the user experience, that's all. If I'm expecting library stuff, other material usually seems inconsequential.)
Third, I found that I judge a blog by its title (particularly as relevant to the subject I'm interested in). For example, when I'm looking for book blogs, I'm inevitably drawn to the ones that have "Book" in their title. That's the rare case where the subject is commonly part of the title; usually I look for titles that are witty and give promise of good, deep, intelligent discussion.
Having said all that, I'm going to split Top of the Mountains into four blogs later today. ToTM will remain as my forum for religious/philosophical/political discussion. My second blog (and these are all unnamed for now) will be a book/literary blog, covering books (of course), library stuff, writing, C.S. Lewis, and languages. Technology will be the topic of my third blog, with discussions about Macs and programming and web design and stuff like that. Finally, my fourth blog will be about education -- homeschooling, teaching, etc. I haven't really written much about that yet, but I plan to homeschool my future kids and so I want to start studying up on it. So anyway, that's the plan, and I'll put it into effect later today (or early tomorrow morning -- it really depends on how soon I can come up with suitable names for each of these new blogs :)).
And addressing the second issue above, these four blogs (the Fantastic Four, hah! -- I'm kidding, of course) will be subject-specific. That is, they'll stick to their topics and I won't introduce tangential material. I guess that leaves me high and dry with no place to put personal stuff, but that's not really a bad thing. :) (That's what journals are for, right?) Anyway, I think this is the right thing to do and will result in better blogging.
Side note: Googling "blogology" returned 109,000 results; "blogosophy" (which was an alternative I considered as the title of this post) returned 13,600. I guess it's pretty clear which term the people have chosen. :)
posted by Ben at 8:21 AM
1 Comments:
Ha ha ha, for some reasons, lots of people discovered great ideas in the shower!
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