Revamping the blog to prevent a fad (for me)

Since starting to work full-time on Mozes, I have also spent some time trying to understand the  relevance of blogging both to me as an individual and to the new company.  As many of my posts have indicated, I am fascinated by the topic of personalization and especially personal web-based RSS readers.  The publish-subscribe model is fundamentally changing the landscape of information flow in ways that we have yet to comprehend.

I started this blog as a business blog because after spending some time reading other blogs, I honed in on some  likes and dislikes about blogs.  I especially like blogs with narrow areas of focus, for example.  I read John Battelle's Searchblog because it informs me about what's going on in the fast changing search marketplace.  While broader in coverage, the Silicon Beat keeps me informed about technology rumors and other goings on in the valley.   Fred Wilson gives the entrepreneur a VC's perspective on the world with a lot of insight.

I'm starting to realize that most blogs I read and like, and the most popular blogs in general, are really well edited newsletters.  I rarely subscribe to a blog to hear about everything that goes on in someone's life (to be clear, if my wife published a journal, I would most certainly subscribe).  Yet it seems that when I want to subscribe to an expert on a certain topic, I also must accept that I am going to learn  about their long weekends or see pictures of house projects on a lazy Sunday afternoon.  That seems wrong to me, and the option of skipping right past it will become horribly inefficient over time as the scale of  content continues to increase.

At the same time, we know that everyone in the world has lots to contribute on a range of topics and that blogging should and can enable that voice.  Increasingly I feel trapped by my "business blog".   From time to time (albeit it's a bad time now with the start-up anyway), I know I'll be interested in participating in other web conversations about politics or culture or hockey, but I don't want to lose the focus of my current blog or turn away readers who care only about my business views.  That raises the question about whether I need to start separate blogs, but I don't  have enough to say or enough creative energy or time to maintain them so that they are truly relevant efforts.   Yet I want to publish and manage my own content.

There has been a lot of publicity around blog ranking lately.  But if content is king,  I wonder if we need to start downplaying blogs altogether.  By example, I would rather collect commentary from 20 different people on "mobile technology" than to review the blogs daily of those same people who are covering a range of topics (like Sunday afternoon projects).  Search is good at discovery of content, but self-defined feed subscription is critical to helping me manage my content. 

The general excitement around blogs and the massive adoption rates show that it has far more promise than being a newsletter.   But I believe it is at risk of being a fad if most individuals feel that their voice will only be heard if their blog in its entirety is the measurement of their success, and not the meaningful, smaller pieces of content that they contribute on a range of topics.   My suspicion is the vast majority of folks tinkering with blogging have no intention of managing or promoting a newsletter, but every blogger wants the opportunity for their voice to be heard when so moved.

I'm going to re-organize my blog for the future.  It will take me some time and experimentation on exactly how to do it and it will evolve over time.  I think I will be playing catch-up to others and re-living past mistakes, but I also think I can (in a small way) contribute to the overall evolution of blogging.

I see the addition of several types of RSS feeds (Silicon Valley Himilayan Expedition remaining as one) as important to this reorganized blog.  Fred Wilson already does what I am thinking to some extent by offering an RSS feed of "VC and technology posts only".   I'm going to establish many categories.  I also see password protected RSS as playing a role, where several feeds may only be accessible by family, friends or  business colleagues.   I want my blog to be the means by which I express myself publicly or privately on all topics (from book reviews to business to photos), but the reader should get better control of what's relevant to them and to what they will subscribe.

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