Keith Devens .com

Four styles of blogging

I'm getting jealous of everybody's link blogs^[1]

As I've been thinking about it, it seems to me that there are about four styles of blogging.

• You have the linkers, the prime example being Erik Thauvin.
• Then, you have the writers, a choice example being Steven Den Beste.
• Then, there are the tweeners, who are really somewhat in between. I'd put blogs like mine, Simon's and Little Green Footballs in this list. You have blogs that are a little bit closer to one side, and some a little bit closer to the other. Sometimes, tweeners just give a link and maybe a quote from whatever we're linking to, but usually we try to say at least a little something about it. Otherwise it doesn't feel worth it.^[2]
• Finally, you have the streamers, the only real example of this I know of is Dave Winer, who uniquely has a constant stream of blogging going on throughout the day. I admire his style, because a lot of times I'd just like to drop little notes or a few quick links that might not be enough content to devote a whole post to, and more importantly usually don't have any more purpose than to say what I was thinking, or post some semi-unrelated links, and this makes it hard to come up with a title and post name in order to blog about it. Dave's style of blog allows for, and encourages, this style of blogging more than, say, mine. To some degree, Adam has a similar style.
• You also have group blogs, like LtU and WHEDONesque, and even Slashdot, which I'm not really considering, since I'm really concerned here with individual blogging habits.

My point in all this is that sometimes, people who generally have one style of blog want to be able to include one of the other styles without disrupting their normal flow. Many bloggers have been integrating linkblogs with their sites lately, Simon being the newest example.

I don't like having the links separate from the main blog, like Mark Pilgrim and Simon do, particularly because it makes it harder to see what's new, and you lose the context of what day something was posted on. I like Leslie's setup, but that works well for him largely because he's a sparse poster and the links will often be the only thing he blogs for the day. If you blog a lot during the day, your link-filled post might get buried under new posts, which makes it less convenient to update the link-post because it won't be obvious that it's been updated.

So, one of the things I'd like to experiment with is having, in addition to my normal blog, a separate section, one per day, that would give me a place to put linker and streamer style stuff without having it get buried under other posts during the day. Something to consider adding to my CMS...

Footnotes:
[1]: I've been wanting to have my own for a while, but I figured I'd finish the next version of my CMS first (first it was just a revision of my PHP CMS, but that failed and now I'm rewriting the whole thing in Python), then I'd finish WeblogNinja along with the backend code (based on the new CMS) that goes with it, and then I'd write a plugin for WeblogNinja to allow me to easily do link-filled posts. Obviously, at this rate I have a long time left before I get there. But I basically refuse to do any more work on my existing PHP codebase.
[2]: If you really want to split it up, you can divide the category into short and long (generally short or generally long posts), dense and sparse (frequent or infrequent posting), as well as self-directed and link-directed (self-directed bloggers blog about what they happen to feel like writing about, while link-directed often see a cool link that they want to highlight or say something about).

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05:22 (utc-5)
edited: 06:08 (utc-5)