Thursday, May 15, 2008

Food for Blog

From The Simple Dollar's article entitled How to Get Personal and Professional Value from Idle Web Surfing.
If you have a personal blog where you write about the drama of your relationship with your girlfriend or you post a lot of pictures of your adorable kittens, you might not want to include this blog in your profiles. Why? This type of information is simply not compelling to anyone but you and your closest friends - certainly not to professional acquaintances and probably not to more casual friends, either.

The same goes for the trail of bread crumbs you leave in your comments in various places. People might be interested in your cat care comments if you’re a vet, but if you’re just in love with your precious kitty, not many people will find that compelling, so resist the urge unless you’re providing information that’s actually useful to others.

It’s fine to post opinions and such, but ask yourself before you post whether or not this information adds any value for anyone else. If it doesn’t, consider carefully whether you should even post it at all - usually, the answer there is no. If you’re careful about that, you wind up giving the impression to others that you’re insightful and useful - and that will encourage people to look more deeply into the thoughts you have to offer.
I think there's some truth to that, but I also think some "personality" on a blog makes things interesting. That's why I've branched out a little from the pure knitting. The most successful knitting blogs seems to be peppered with some personal information and stories that keep people coming back for more. I've thought about making this blog more of a "informative" blog and less of a record of my own misadventures, like burning bacon or going to the dentist. But I feel like it needs personality.

I think the swatch entries need more valuable information. At this point, they are mostly a photographic record for myself.

Thoughts anyone?

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