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On Schedules, Focus and Professionalism

A while back, Brenda posted this nice post giving advice for “newbies” who want to keep a blog. So, I totally agree with all her points about how you should keep a blog as a student, but I found it interesting that I’ve basically violated almost everyone one of them: I don’t update on a set schedule, I occasionally will post something completely unrelated, and my blog has kind of shifted focus over the past year from being purely about game design theory to a blog that shifts between programming and game design theory. Am I exempt since I’ve held a game programming job and currently work at a game middleware startup? I’m really not sure, but one thing I have to wonder is whether or not my lack of focus or a set schedule affects my audience or my readership.

Personally, I think the schedule idea mattered more before the days of RSS, when you had the “morning crawl” every day when you got to work. I still do the “morning crawl” but it’s mostly just a crawl of RSS feeds that I didn’t get around to reading the day before or missed articles from. Whether or not they’re on a schedule or not doesn’t affect me, and I wonder how many people are the same. In fact, a blogger that posts too much I just tend to ignore, since I find I usually just can’t keep up. Again, I wonder if this is a common phenomenon.

As for focus, I think that’s an interesting question. I post mostly about programming and weird game design theories, and interestingly the two subjects are about as far apart as I can make them. The programming side is very practical, talking about how I solved very specific problems, whereas the game design stuff is all theoretical: not a single practical piece of information in that category really. The third major category for me is newbie advice, which I’m always happy to hand out. I think more people found my blog from the Top 10 things response than any other single article (mostly because of the Game Set Watch link), and I’m sure some people subscribed to my blog after that expecting more newbie advice. So I’m happy not having a focus per-se. But of course I don’t really jump fields completely, I guess you consider this blog focused if you squint your eyes and cross them a bit.

Anyway, I’m interested to hear what my readers have to say. Would you rather have me update on a set schedule? Would you rather have me focus on (or at least post more about) a particular subject? Would you rather I not talk about agency theory quite so much? I’m interested in what people have to say.

By: Jeff | 01/31/08 | General | Trackback | Comments [RSS 2.0]

4 Responses to “On Schedules, Focus and Professionalism” »»

BBrathwaite

Comment by BBrathwaite | 02/01/08 at 6:14 am

You make a really good point about RSS feeds, actually. My experience is the same as yours. Netvibes just collects everything for me until I can read it.
Meta

Comment by Meta | 02/01/08 at 10:22 am

I think you are right on with the RSS feeds - I have removed a few people because they actually just post to often with too little content in each post. But, that is just me - can’t really generalize that.

And posting on-topic? Ya, you should probably be approximately in the same ballpark most of the time but I think that would come naturally if you are posting about things you actually care about.

I have read a few of those ‘rules to blogging’ things and always just thought: “Sure, if you are trying to make blogging your job (for cash, sub-numbers and/or amazon gifts) and you are posting about things you don’t particularly care about but you think people will read - then those make sense”. But if your blog is primarily for you and secondary for your readers. And you post about the things you care about. It will generally be on-track and the people that want to read it, will.

My 2c anyways.
bill

Comment by bill | 02/05/08 at 10:57 pm

Jeff, I think for your blog, post when you feel the muse. Post on what you want to post. it is your blog. I’d be upset to lose your insight if you stopped posting on programming to begin an in-depth multipart series on flower arranging, but why should you care? it’s your blog. Maybe knowing that you like flower arranging would spur some of us to give it a try. I think it is a game waiting to be developed for the Wii, personally.
Darren Torpey

Comment by Darren Torpey | 02/10/08 at 7:00 pm

I’ve often questioned the wisdom of that kind of conventional advice because it always contradicts everything about how I read blogs. You said it best: RSS makes frequency almost completely irrelevant, and the same goes for focus as well. I care very little what the topic of an individual post is (and whether it fits well categorically with the others from that blog) because the nature of how I’m choosing whether to read the post makes it easy to skip a post.

Think about it: Many, many people read sites like RubyInside (the theme of which is as vague as “Ruby programming language stuff”). The topic of posts vary from specific techniques to discussions about the Ruby community itself. I imagine that any given reader’s interest in a given article will vary *greatly*, and yet that is expected, and the format of the site itself makes it easy to just look past an article that doesn’t interest you much. I’d argue that RSS readers do the same for just about any blog.

And besides, I really do think you need to just write what you care about, whenever you feel most motivated to do so. (My own trouble is mostly to do with beating the de-motivators)

I really do think that people need to stop acting like blogging as an activity means a specific type of behavior from the author and a specific set of expectations about building readership, etc. Blogs aren’t just about what’s new or being “the place everyone goes to read every day”; they’re about expression, sharing, and community. And each blogger does their best when they blog what they’re best at, however they can. So just keep doing it your way, man.

On Schedules, Focus and Professionalism

4 Responses to “On Schedules, Focus and Professionalism” »»

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