Multiblogging
Back in January 2004, I was wondering whether I had time outside my job as a print journalist to maintain even one blog. With the launch of this blog on technologyreview.com, I now have three.
I know I’m not alone. Technorati tracks just over 11 million blogs worldwide, but the actual number of bloggers is probably much lower, given that many people maintain multiple blogs under a single blog hosting account, or have blogs at several locations such as LiveJournal, TypePad, and Blogger. My blog count of three doesn’t even include the pseudo-blogs that go along with my accounts at places like Bloglines and Wallop.
Why on earth would anyone need three blogs, let alone one? (It’s important to remember that many people, if they know about blogs at all, still see bloggers as suffering from a peculiar blend of folly, arrogance, and narcissism.) I think the logic comes down to this: blogs are inherently personal, and we inhabit more than one persona as we move through our days. To the extent that blogging is becoming an important mode of self-expression and social interaction, therefore, we need a separate blog for each of our personae.
My first blog, Travels with Rhody, started out as a catch-all site where I wrote about “science, technology, the Internet, and life with a dog.” Most of the stuff related to my hobbies and miscellaneous interests, but I also blogged pretty frequently about technology stories that seemed too time-sensitive, too specialized, or too weird to write about in Technology Review.
Once a group technology blog was launched on technologyreview.com, I started doing most of my technology-related blogging there, and reserved Travels with Rhody for non-work stuff. But posting there didn’t feel all that rewarding to me. It’s a group blog, which means it’s rich with variety, but on the other hand it can’t be shaped to anyone’s personality, style, or particular interests.
This spring, my assignments for the magazine brought me to the point where I felt like I needed a one-man blog where I could air a single subject: social computing, the theme of a feature article I’ve written for TR’s August issue. The interface for THIS blog (the one you’re reading right now) wasn’t ready yet, so I launched the social-computing blog as a satellite site, the Continuous Computing Blog, using TypePad as a platform. We decided to use that blog to make the August article into an experiment in participatory journalism. The experiment involved a bit of JavaScripting that would have been difficult using the main TR site, which turned out to be another good reason to start a satellite blog. And if things go right, the August article will grow into a book. So Continuous Computing is a sort of hybrid work/personal blog where discussions on social computing can continue well past August, and where I can organize my thoughts for the bigger project.
And that brings us to this blog, Tech Coast. Here, I’ll blog about all things technological except ideas that relate directly to social computing, which will go to the Continuous Computing blog. I feel like I’ve got all the bases covered (at least for now): my home life, my work-related professional life, and my non-work-related professional life. Each of these personae has different things to say, to different audiences, and there’s no reason the readers of my TR blogs should have to suffer through my musings about macro photography and doggie day care.
Now that blogging tools have become so inexpensive and so easy to use, maintaining multiple blogs is almost as easy as having just one—at least from an administrative point of view. Of course, you still need to have something different to say in each blog. But I think multiblogging will grow in popularity as people realize that blogs are far more than online diaries. They’re channels for one-to-many and many-to-many interactions, on subjects that can be personal, professional, social, political, religious, or what-have-you. If we have 500 channels on our TVs, why not have two or three Internet channels for ourselves?
Article was available here
So what are you reading these days?
By Corie Lok Febuary 2005
These days it seems everyone’s blogging. Combine this newest source of information with more traditional online news sources, and you could spend your whole day slogging through lists of bookmarked Web pages just to keep up. Rojo Networks is one of the latest of a bevy of startups trying to help Web users make better sense of this content explosion. The year-and-a-half-old startup’s approach is to help users home in on the most relevant and interesting news and blogs by finding out what others in their online social networks are reading.
in enabling users to draw on the insights of friends, family, colleagues, and others in their social networks, Rojo departs from most of the competition. Rojo users can invite others to sign up for Rojo accounts; those accounts are linked, much like the accounts on the popular website Friendster. Rojo users can see what RSS feeds the members of their networks are reading and which stories they are flagging. Network popularity also affects the ranking of results when the user searches RSS feeds. “We all depend on our community for content discovery,” says Chris Alden, Rojo’s cofounder and CEO. “Any successful media service has to tap into that.”