Keep a narrow focus in your blog

I think it very important to keep a blog narrowly focused.

I'm using the "blogging about blogging" vehicle as a way of collecting pointers that  will help me grow another blog or two, but I am starting to be tempted to vector off into different topics, such as why I have trouble connecting with most teacher and educator blogs. Now, this would be a perfectly fine blog topic if it were situated correctly, but it ain't germaine to the "blog about blogs" trope.

Jeff Atwood, in the Coding Horror page cited elsewhere, notes that your readers aren't here to read about you. He says it's okay to "be yourself" but..."like Tabasco sauce and other powerful seasonings, a little YOU goes a long way. A really long way. Write accordingly."

I'm pondering literature, "real writing," in this light. Perhaps this is exactly why literature is so onerous a burden on many readers; a Graham Greene or a Montaigne or a James Joyce or a Henry Miller is a monster of  personality. You are immersed in this person for a while.

To be very grand and media-criticky about this, I think he may have zeroed in on one of the characteristics, the essential traits of the blog medium: a certain impersonality, or rather a format that makes "personality" deeply uninteresting.

I deeply love the novel and the personal essay, and the monsters of personality, bristling with quirks, that somehow make their way into publication through these media.

There is a certain isolation in the covers of a book that is absent in the blogosphere. You are necessarily one among many, and your neuroses, vanity, and the psychological drivers that make you write -- are common as dirt, and nobody finds them interesting.

So, this ain't a novel, and it ain't a personal essay. And there is a certain inherent "meta-ness" about a blog, it can't be the thing itself, it is an overview, a collection of pointers into a topic or thing that you are "marketing" or "sharing" or "tossing out there". It is by nature an adjunct to another production or activity, it is a parasite.

So, fine. At this point I'm not sure what my "real" blogs are going to be about, but I know they're going to be about one of the three or four things I know something about, or the three or four other things I know nothing about, but have strong feelings about anyway.

One thing that makes me different from some other bloggers is that not only am I a professional teacher, but I am a compulsive teacher.

For me to understand something means that I can, in turn, present it as something that facilitates somebody else actually creating something.

For this reason perhaps I'm more patient than some people with the shallowness and the "meta-ness" of blogs. This is perhaps a strength; perhaps too it is a trap.