I follow a lot of strangers over on Twitter, each one usually for a different reason that I find interesting. Sometimes they follow me back for one reason or another, and it gives me a little bit of anxiety. The anxiety is because here is this person whose content I like, who followed me back probably because of an interaction we had, and she is expecting that my tweets will be more of the same kind of content.
But often it’s not. I don’t write about the same kind of thing all the time - one only needs to look at this blog to see that. I write on a variety of topics that interest me, from stuff I learn working as a software developer to movies to games to tv shows to things that are going on in my country to quotes I like and all other kinds of stuff.
For a while I considered that blogging might be more effective if I had a more focused blog, instead of this chaotic willy-nilly mess I’ve refused to give up on since 2002. I’ve tried starting topic-centered blogs before, about stuff like Magic the Gathering or comic books or software development using Django, but most of those efforts collpased and I just absorbed the contents back into this blog.
I think having a focused blog depends really on your goals. Like, if your goal is to have a blog with a lot of followers and to grow your audience and to monetize through ads or newsletters or other methods, then focused, specific content is the way to go. But for me and this blog, as I like to remind myself, I’m writing largely for myself. This blog and this website are my presence on the internet, more than any social media account. Thus, it should reflect all my interests in totality, not just the ones that I can monetize or get me more work or whatever.
I’m reminded of how sometimes on Twitter famous people like tech personalities will comment on something like politics and they’ll get people who are disagreeable and go “I follow you for your tech content, please keep your politics out of this”, which is ridiculous. Just because a person is primarily known for a certain thing doesn’t mean their opinions and personalities can be limited to that thing only and for all time. People are multi-faceted, they have many views and many interests and they should be allowed to express themselves on whatever topic they like (within reasonable limits obviously no to hate speech thanks.)
On a barely related blog note: something I’ve been putting off for a while, I merged categories and tags on this blog. It just seems to make more sense. I probably broke some links somewhere though, I’ll figure it out.
See Also