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:
- I really would like to post more about library leadership and philosophy topics as they relate to technology.
- 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
- 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
- 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?
- 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?
Jodi Schneider said,
January 7, 2010 @ 06:01:48
Use categories. We’ll either read it all or subscribe to separate feeds.
Andy said,
January 7, 2010 @ 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.
Dominique Papin said,
January 7, 2010 @ 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
David A. Harding said,
January 7, 2010 @ 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!
ecorrado said,
January 8, 2010 @ 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.
ecorrado said,
January 8, 2010 @ 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.
Kate said,
January 11, 2010 @ 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.
Of QR Codes, Foursquare and Ning « 32 Flavors and Then Some said,
January 31, 2010 @ 19:01:55
[...] State native) Ed Corrado touches on a problem many bloggers (including this one) have – finding direction in a blog that covers multiple interests. The Ning model offers selective publishing. If want to talk LIS, I can blog about it in my [...]