Two types of blogs
I met and had lunch with MIT alum and Atlas Ventures EIR Babak Nivi last week, and he had a very helpful axis of evaluation for blogs that I hope he doesn’t mind me repeating here.
To paraphrase very roughly, we can position any blog as somewhere along a continuum of introspective versus extrospective. Introspective blogs tend to discuss personal issues, life experiences, thoughts and ponderings, and so forth. Extrospective blogs, on the other hand, deal with things, events and ideas out in the world, as witnessed and analyzed by the author. Extrospective blogs, he posited, are more likely to find wider readership. This makes sense, since they create and expand the common ground for dialog.
This blog sort of bounces back and forth, but veering towards introspective. I’d like to gradually shift a little more towards extro. Take one like Anita’s bestthing, which is definitely extrospective in its coverage of things we can all talk about, but nicely personal and introspectively revealing in the selection process. Luis’s blacklog is a really nice example of a hybrid, since it includes so many images, but those images are often of his own creation. For both these guys, the key is their approach to the blog as a curation process as much as a writing process.
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