I’ve been giving some thought to my blog of late, partly because I haven’t been writing in it and I feel guilty because of it. I am trying to create a schedule for myself which would hopefully force me to sit down and write for the blog a few times a week. We’ll see how that works out, so far not great but now that I’ve been getting time out of work I’ve started using it to catch up on other things that I’ve been ignoring. The other part of the blog thoughts stems from the 43 Folders podcast.
I’ve never really listened to 43 Folders before this point, or visited either this site or Daring Fireball really before. I mean I’ve heard of both of these sites and heard of the podcast and heard it was really good and all that. But I just never had the time to really sit down and listen to them. Now with my DSi, I’ve been picking up a lot more podcast goodness again, despite the extra work that it seems to entail. (I really need to find a podcast to AAC converter of some sort, damn Nintendo for not allowing more formats!)
It just so happens that this first podcast that I listened to from them was their panel on blogging at SXSW. I felt like this podcast was aiming directly at me. On some level, I’ve been at a sort of crisis on this website of late. I’m not posting as much, which coupled with me not dropping on entrecard anymore, means that I’m getting far less traffic than I used to. This probably doesn’t help urge me to submit more blogs either. So it is cyclical, and this podcast had a lot to say to me that made me basically evaluate how I am doing things here.
The first thing I really felt interested in was the reason why they don’t really have much advertising on their sites. One of them said that he wanted to own everything on the page and that the site was literally his. I understand this a lot actually, and I wish I could do this. But the reality of it to me is that I can’t. I’m not extremely well off, and while it isn’t overly expensive to run a website, it is another cost that I must endure. All these advertisements that I have likely recoup about 2 months of my costs a year. Ultimately, I’d like to at least be able to break even, but I’d also like to upgrade to better servers. It is interesting to me that Daring Fireball actually charges for members to post on his site and also charges advertisers on the RSS feeds but I can’t get away with either of those methods.
However, for me there is a bit of ownership that I could do. First of all, I could decrease advertising a little. Some of the ads on my site I have because I have tested out some types of advertising and just never gotten rid of. Another thought is that to lower my rate of borrowing. I borrow multimedia essentially. Almost all of the pictures I put on my site come from flickr. This has always had two benefits for me. It moves the bandwidth cost to them, and it also offers me an availability of quality photographs for little work. In return, they get a link (like they need it). I could lower this from maybe 95% to 50% even if the alternative is to just not have pictures, which sucks because I like to have some sort of graphic on a post to break up all the text. Maybe I could do like 43 folders and have extra headers spent throughout the post to break it up?
Doing what you Love…
Another thing they talked about was talking about what you love, or what you can’t stop thinking about. Well for me this is difficult because my mind wanders a lot. I always blog about things that I’m passionate about, there is just a wide variety of issues that I consider. I’ve always completely ignored the dichotomy of “create a niche and run with it.” This obvious to anyone who follows the blog at any lenght, or just from looking at the 5 most recent topics. One post I’ll be talking about how retarded the stimulus package is, the next post I’ll talk about how the RIAA sucks, and then I go on a 5 page rant on MMOs.
If I had to say precisely what this blog was about in a single sentence, I would say it is “world views from an online gamer.” This actually sums it up pretty well because this doesn’t limit me to online games, I can talk about games, tech and even politics. However, maybe I should refine it a little. Perhaps, I shouldn’t be ranting on the stimulus package unless that rant somehow incorporates tech or the internet or something like that to bring it home. I could have, after all there is stuff in there about getting outlying communities connected, but that isn’t where I went. Maybe this is something to consider in the future.
If anyone has any thoughts in what needs to change on this blog though, now is your chance. I’m thinking about it and I will certainly consider what others want.