Over on Eileen Flanagan’s Imper­fect Seren­ity, there’s an inter­est­ing post on blog pub­lic­ity, “Blog­ging dilem­mas,” inspired in part by Robin M“‘s recent “How did you get here?” post. Both bring up inter­est­ing ques­tions about the role of blogs in com­mu­nity build­ing and the loca­tion of that line that sep­a­rates good blog­ging from mere self-promotion and pandering.

Read­ers will prob­a­bly be unsur­prised to learn that I use Tech­no­rati, Google Blog Search, etc., every day to keep track of the Quaker blo­gos­phere. I act as a kind of com­mu­nity orga­nizer and my searches are for inter­est­ing posts talk­ing about Quak­ers (until read­ing Eileen’s post I hadn’t check my Tech­no­rati “rank” in months). Many people’s first intro­duc­tion to Quak​erQuaker​.org is get­ting linked from it, and I sus­pect I’ve acci­den­tally outed a few begin­ning blog­gers who hadn’t told any­one of their new blog!

I have a pro­fes­sional blog on web design and ana­lyt­ics (with a some­what off-topic but sat­is­fy­ing post on top at the moment) and sep­a­rat­ing that out has allowed me to use this per­sonal blog, Quak­er­Ran­ter, for what­ever I like. Most reg­u­larly read­ers would say it focuses on Quak­erism and cute kid pic­tures and while those are the most com­mon posts, the most read posts are the minor fas­ci­na­tions I indulge myself with occa­sion­ally. Quaker plain dress is some­thing I prac­tice but don’t think about most of the time (806 read­ers in past month). My wife and I love to bust on bad baby names and unfairly unpop­u­lar baby names (627 vis­its). I’ve also detailed some out­ings to semi-legendary South Jer­sey haunts (317) and score high on searches to them.

The con­ven­tional wis­dom of the blog-as-publicity tool crowd would prob­a­bly say these off-topic posts are dis­tract­ing my core audi­ence. Per­haps, but they’re infre­quent on the blog and long-lived on Google. Besides, I think it helps peo­ple to know I’m not just obsessed with one topic. Being a part of a real com­mu­nity means know­ing each other in all of our quirks. I’m more ten­der and for­giv­ing of other Quaker blog­gers when I know more of their story: it puts what they say into a con­text that makes it sound more lived, less ide­o­log­i­cal. There’s cer­tainly good rea­sons for tightly-focused pro­fes­sional blogs (I’d drop Techcrunch from my blogroll if they started post­ing kids pic­tures!), but as more peo­ple read posts through feeds and aggre­ga­tors I won­der if there’s going to be as much pres­sure for per­sonal, community-oriented blogs to be as single-minded in their focus.

We all have diverse, quirky inter­ests so why not indulge them? I have seen blogs that try too hard to pan­der to par­tic­u­lar audi­ences and boy, are they bor­ing! A cer­tain degree of idio­syn­crasy and sub­jec­tive orner­i­ness is prob­a­bly essen­tial. Per­son­al­ity is at least as impor­tant as focus.

PS: I’m also inter­ested in mak­ing sure I don’t loose the core audi­ence with all my side trips, hence the “lat­est Quaker posts” at the top of the page. I have at least one request for a Quaker-only RSS feed and will even­tu­ally get that going.
PPS: As if on queue, the next post in Google Reader after Eileen’s is Avin­ish Kaushik’s Blog Met­rics: Six rec­om­men­da­tions for mea­sur­ing your suc­cess. Parts of it are prob­a­bly a bit tech­ni­cal for most QR read­ers but it’s use­ful for think­ing about blogs as outreach.