Parallel blogs
October 1st, 2006
Writing parallel blogs is the new big thing. Writing parallel blogs makes you a multi-blogger, a super-blogger, a hyper-blogger.
Parallel blogs are more than a sum of the parts (as a house is more than a collection of bricks). But what should we call the new latent structure?
Arthur Whitman suggested “meta-blog”, which I find good, and “personal blog network”, which I find less good. C. Robin Janning suggested “book”, a bold proposition — it requires modifying the definition of this word.
In bookofjoe we see an alternative solution: combine several parallel blogs into one (with a separate archive file for each day). I can’t quite follow it, but I enjoy what I read.
John Foote writes parallel blogs (mm and mydr2) without using a blog at all.
Auspicious Dragon runs seven blogs in parallel (and confuses the heck out of my RSS reader [well, see the comments]).
Do you write parallel blogs? What are you creating between the lines?
October 1st, 2006 at 5:12 am
Auspicious Dragon runs one website with lots of different streams of content :-)
Serious question: did you mean confuses you or confuses your RSS reader? I’ve tested the feed with a number of readers, but not all (obviously).
Your reader should pick up the stream header (“photostream blog”) which is also a link to the new content, a brief description of that content, and a link to the “what’s new” page.
On a slightly separate point and relating to one of your earlier posts – I decided not to put the content into the RSS feed and only to put the header. I actively want people to visit the site and browse around. Putting the entire content in the RSS feed doesn’t encourage them to do this. The model is much more like a paper publication than a web one. You pick it up (go there) for the front page headline, but then something else catches you eye.
The word “blog” has become associated with a particular style of presentation – very linear, difficult to find things not on the front page, no indexing and so on. However, the idea of a weBlog is a broader idea than the current Blogger templates. Perhaps the word “journal” is more appropriate. Just stuff going on today.
October 1st, 2006 at 8:55 am
A symphony of pairs – clouds, rocks, streams, humans.
What are the paired entities off the far-distant tree on the right?
October 1st, 2006 at 11:16 am
click on the picture to enlarge and you should be able to see better.
October 1st, 2006 at 11:38 am
Auspicious, thanks for the interesting comments. I will make a reply after thinking a bit more. As for the confusion, I guess you could say it is mine, rather than the newsreader program’s.
October 1st, 2006 at 12:39 pm
A butterfly!
October 1st, 2006 at 4:47 pm
I am pretty happy with a proper website and one blog… I personally feel no need for more.
I have seen some people who have multiple blogs, like more than 3 that I find amazing how they can control it all. It can be confusing for the reader to know which one to go for but maybe the writer have one blog for each type of visitor.
October 1st, 2006 at 8:51 pm
Auspicious,
I understand the idea of wanting to bring visitors to the real web-site, and for this reason showing abbreviated content. From my point of view as a reader, I think I should be trusted to decided if I want to read the post in my newsreader or if to visit the site itself. It won’t be long before the newsreaders support the full blog-commenting interface, I’m sure.
When I send email to someone, I don’t expect them to read it in my own email reading program — the idea never even occurred to me. “Sending” your blog via a site feed is a bit like sending email. Why not let people use the viewing program of their choice?
I now better understand the presentation of your site on my newsreader. Still, I see photostream as a standalone blog, so I would like to be able to view the contents in the same way as other blogs. If it has a natural connection with your other 6 blogs, then I should find this in a natural way through in-post links.
This tension between the standalone blog and the blog group (personal blog network, meta blog, “book”, “diary”, “daybook”) is precisely what I am getting at in this post. The difficulty comes in part because we (you) are building a new type of structure for which there is not yet a name, or a standard template. Thus, the user must learn how to interact. This is not bad, of course, but it implies that the writer should make an extra effort with the process of bundling the sites/blogs together. It would be the same if you were blogging before the word “blog” became standard. People would be unfamiliar with the format and would need to learn about it.
Angela,
The issue of how the reader should know where to go is a key issue. I’m beginning to feel this way: from the reader’s point of view, it will make relatively little difference who writes the blog; they are interested in the content. If the writer wants to have a particular reader come to all his or her separate blogs, then he or she should provide this motivation in the content of the blogs themselves. If you can suitably combine your material in one blog, then there is no reason to have more.
In this view, the structure created by the multiple blogs of a single writer (or couple) is something like a “personal blogosphere” (sorry Arthur).