A few posts back I wrote about the toss-up of using your blog to take part in a blogosphere conversation vs. keeping it on topic.
A blogs have a theme – even the ones that don’t have a tangible theme can say via lowest common denominator that they are about the person who wrote them (this blog is an example of that — there is no common thread to all my posts, other than they are stuff that interests me).
Successful bloggers have found that having some kind of theme or genre boundaries is good for subscribers and advertisers. It’s a shame I haven’t discovered that yet. 🙂
So when people say “use your blog to response to another blog post, and create conversation via trackback” there is a friction for those who want to respond about stuff that’s nothing to do with their genre. For others, just writing responses breaks the flow of their otherwise punchy blog.
TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington has CrunchNotes, and now my favourite blogger Om Malik (I really want to meet Om, he’s great) has “The Daily Om“.
“I feel sooner or later, many of us who are addicted to blogging, will have to set up the equivalent of Page 3 on their blogs. I am sure other are going to disagree, but my instincts tell me that I am right. Think of it as me applying the dolby filter to the content.”
Hmmm, I think the equivalent of Page 3 (explanation) on my blog would look like something else, but that’s another story…
Joking aside, Om’s spot on. His instincts are right, and I can see this being a big theme of 2006 – people getting their second, third, forth blog. Blogs are cheap/free so why not? And for many of us it’s already the case.
The question, therefore, is what can blogging platforms do to cater for this? Movable Type does multiple blogs and Blogger and TypePad also cater for it. So come on Matt, you gotta get WordPress multiblog working.
And in the meantime I need to work on a mini start-up that solves the problem of how to people aggregate their disparate feeds so that they can easily offer a single feed of all their blogs…
PS: Om, you should really call your blog “The Daily Blog, with Om Malik”. That’d be cool!