Blog directions

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the direction of blog.ecorrado.us. There a number of things that are making me do this:

  1. I really would like to post more about library leadership and philosophy topics as they relate to technology.
  2. If you read back on old posts, I used to post a lot more about going to autoracing events, now I hardly ever do. In fact, I haven’t in approximately 1.5 years. I have now been to over 200 tracks and feel like a real member of the TrackChasers community. Thus, I feel even more of a desire to write brief blog posts about autoracing
  3. People have suggested to me that I should start a food blog, and I have some good ideas about how to do that, and am considering it. This is especially true since I’ve become addicted to reading some food-related blogs such as (never home)maker and Simply Recipes
  4. Do Trackchasers want to read about food and libraries? Do librarians want to read about racing and food? In other words, is a single blog approach appropriate?
  5. This all requires time.

Right now, I am leaning towards starting separate blogs for the autoracing and food topics, with this one being more of a professional blog and the racing one containing most of the personal stuff and my “top ten” posts about college football. This would lead me to having 3 blogs. I’m a little skeptical of keeping my food blog populated (how many chili recipes can one person post?) – which is also a concern.

However, I’m not sure. In theory, keeping one blog with three categories would be the best way to do this, but do people really just subscribe to categories in their RSS readers? I tend to doubt it.

What do people think about hybrid personal, hobby, and work blogs? Should they be avoid in favor of separate blogs?

8 Comments

  1. Jodi Schneider said,

    January 7, 2010 at 06:01:48

    Use categories. We’ll either read it all or subscribe to separate feeds. :)

  2. Andy said,

    January 7, 2010 at 10:01:06

    I read your blog via Planet Code4Lib, and I’m only interested in your code/lib postings. Whichever approach you take, please make sure aggregators only pick up the relevant posts.

  3. Dominique Papin said,

    January 7, 2010 at 11:01:44

    I personally prefer seperate blogs. I don’t mind a personnal post every now and then in a professionnal blog, but I think a blog should have one main focus.
    Just my 2 cents

  4. David A. Harding said,

    January 7, 2010 at 20:01:55

    I vote for categories and descriptive headlines. Currently I subscribe to your main feed but skip auto racing posts and nitty-gritty library posts. As long as you continue writing clear headlines, it’s no work for me to click “Next Item” in my feed reader when I see posts that don’t interest me.

    Also, I love chili, so bring on the receipes!

  5. ecorrado said,

    January 8, 2010 at 10:01:14

    @Andy: Good point about the aggregators. If I do decide to go with categories, I will let the people who run Planet Code4Lib know what the appropriate feed should be.

  6. ecorrado said,

    January 8, 2010 at 11:01:25

    @Dominique: The separation of the personal from professional blogs is one of my concerns about a joint blog. Yes, professional and personal often overlap [1] , but I assume some of the people who read my blog for the library and/or technology related posts wouldn’t know me from a hole in the wall if I were next to them on an airplane. I doubt these people really care about the non-professional aspects of my life unless they have the same quirky interests – which is highly doubtful.

    I think I may have to look at how I can have the 3 blogs be one or three, depending on what people want to look at. I probably can do that with WordPress without too much trouble if I do a bit of research.

    [1] At least they seem to in the USA – I’m not sure how universal this is – some of my research on Francophone vs. Anglophone blogs makes me think that this may be different in other cultures.

  7. Kate said,

    January 11, 2010 at 20:01:35

    My (woefully neglected) blog is the hybrid model you presently have – a little bit of the professional (lib sci stuff) and a little bit of the personal (knitting, what’s going on in my life). I categorize stuff so that my knitting friends can gloss over the lib and info sci and vice versa – and so my mom can gloss over everything (I don’t even think she KNOWS i blog) until I misquote one of their malapropisms and I get an earful.

    That being said, since you and I share some of the same interests, I pretty much read everything. But if you think separate feeds/blogs/whatever works for you, go for it.

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