a split blogging personality

Tonight I read this post from Jeremiah Owyang on the other 5 stages of blogging. His take on how blogs evolve and can become successful, go from step 1: Excitement, step 2: Expectation to step 3: Focus, continuing with step 4: Passion and step 5: Achievement. It was his step 3 that set me thinking: Focus. Does my blog have a clear focus?

Funny enough for this blog, my step 1 was the focus, I started this blog with a clear goal as a place to keep track of my research on educational technology. As I was busy with work and some happenings in my private life at the time, the blog became dormant for a while. Only recently I revived it again and at the same time broadened my focus. Including some business related posts, some more on technology not directly related to education and some more on education not directly related to technology.

Some people combine all their writings into a single blog, comprising of personal and professional posts. In my case I have decided to split my writings into several blogs:

whitecat.moblog.com.sg – my personal blog

The focus of this blog is purely to write about events that are happening in my life and that I want to reflect on. I also do photo blogs, whereby my events are illustrated in the form of photographs. I write in this blog under a pseudonym, to hide my real identity, and protect family and friends that I might write about. Not that I’m writing anything bad, but it’s my personal view on things.

I feel moblog is very good for personal blogging, as it allows the sending of MMS and SMS blogs, so when I’m out and about and see something funny, interesting or worth noting, I snap a picture with my mobile and send it directly to my blog. No need to wait till I’m home, upload to PC first, etc. There are also group blogs, with the option to close the group, so that only invited members can enter and share information, photos, etc on certain topics. The interface can be customised relatively easy to your personal taste.

It would also be a great tool for educational blogging, whereby of course the focus for blogging would be a certain school project. Content Craft, the organisation behind moblog in Singapore, is also setting up blog engines for schools and universities.

whitecatsg.multiply.com – my photo blog

My multiply blog is my latest online personality. After having had webshots albums online and then my personal website, all were running out of space and I wanted to have one single point where I’m keeping my photos online for sharing with family and friends. I evaluated flickr, photobucket, but found them very similar to webshots and the free amount of photos to share was limited. Multiply it was! I immediately fell in love with the ease and speed of uploading photos, and there is no limit. The only restriction is that the high resolution version of the photo will be automatically deleted from the server when you didn’t order any prints from them within six months. There is even an option to share certain albums or other content only with certain contacts. And creating your own look is fairly easy to do if you know how to use css, and if you don’t you can look at other people’s creations and copy one of them.

Multiply also allows you to create a blog, share music and video content and keep a calendar of events. I’m using the blog option to keep my scuba dive logs, using the reviews section to post my recipe book online, and the calendar to let my friends and family know what I’m doing, if there are any important dates they should know about.

Back to this blog, I am still wondering whether the 5 stages could apply here. I believe that achievement is more pertaining to corporate blogs or people blogging for money or a greater good. In my case, this is just a place where I’m gathering my thoughts and observations. If there are others interested in this, that’s great of course, but not the goal of my blogging. Yet a blog should have a focus, and I think that I have achieved that by splitting up my blogs based on different scopes and target audiences. Should I blog about this in my moblog blog, I’m very sure most of my audience will not be interested in this. Vice versa, if I would add all my personal rantings here in wordpress, I would also draw a different kind of audience. It’s a trade-off, but for the time being, I’ll continue the way I started… a split personality…