One of the oddities for me in thinking about blogs is that there is rarely a sense of someone staying “on topic” in the sense of traditional publications. If you read the Wall Street Journal, you know what you’re going to get, and where you’re going to get it, often to the column on the page. If you read CNET News.com, ditto… although the web removes some of those navigation cues.
With blogs, you’re reading about individuals, and most of us have — and share — varied interests. Some folks even blog about those different interests in the same place, with or without categorization. That diversity — all in the same blog — is part of the appeal for me, but it sure makes it hard to categorize different voices into coherent groupings.
Is Tim Bray an engineer/entrepreneur/photographer/father/Sun employee/Canadian? Yes. Is Matt Mullenweg a musician/coder/photographer/one-time Texan, current Californian/open-source leader/CNET employee? Yes. Am I a father/husband/brother/reader/runner/map dilettante/CNET News.com employee/product manager/San Francisco resident? Yes. Is it useful to apply these labels? Not really. But how do you describe why you would read, for instance, Jeremy Zawodny’s blog?
I read all of the above, among many others. [One more item for the blog to-do list: a real blogroll, just because.] To the early adopters, among which I count myself, the names above often mean something, whether you know them as a person or not. Some of the labels stick. But the reason this still works is that the early adopters in the blogging world are still a small group, David Sifry’s numbers be damned. That’s why I use the “echochamber” label for this group, even though I’m one of those listening and, at times, contributing. It’s a lousy label, but I use it to remind myself that this evolution is still in the early stages, so I have to temper my excitement with patience. Just building it is not enough to get them to come.
Which reminds me… my original point was how hard it is to categorize blogs in any useful way. It’s actually harder than labelling someone in person because you meet people in the real world in certain contexts, and it’s only later that your knowledge of who a person is expands to frames of reference beyond the original context. When you read a blog, you often get multiple insights about a person’s interests in one quick scan/read. Granted, that’s only what they choose to share, but even that is often irreducible. And that’s great.
Next time I’ll stay on topic. Whatever that topic might be!