I’ve always resisted the urge to create more than one weblog for myself because I know that, given my very small amount of free time, there’s enough labor involved in the upkeep of just this one without compounding the labor with another. Moreover, I’ve been nursing an idea for many years (to which I’ve hinted here a few times) that this weblog is just one early form of what will eventually be a massive database that contains most everything about my life. If it happens between the day I was born and the day that I die, the idea is that it would be recorded here.
Get Yer Design, Technology, Macs Right Here
Or at least I’ve been nursing the dream of such a database, anyway. Making explicit the relationships between all things in my life is a kind of madman’s fancy that no weblog could ever hope to fulfill. The reality of this site, though, has been that it has increasingly become focused on an important but hardly comprehensive subset of all that life stuff: design, technology and the Macintosh (lots of Macintosh).
It’s those topics that readers seem to return for regularly, or at least those are the posts that readers like to comment on the most. I’m happy with that — I’m grateful for any readership I have, frankly — but I’ve really been considering whether or not running one Web site really does it in terms of letting me do all the writing that I’d like. Some days, I don’t want to write about any of those core topics at all, and instead focus on other matters. But doing so feels like a dilution of what this site is known for, and so I’m inclined to refrain.
Pity My Movie Posts
Specifically, I’ve been thinking for some time now about the abysmal under-performance of any of the posts I’ve written on movies. To put it bluntly: people don’t seem to really care for them, which could just mean that they’re generally not very impressive. On the other hand, I enjoy writing them quite a bit, just as much as I enjoy watching the movies. Admittedly, my passion for film has lost out repeatedly to design and work over the past few years, but I still cherish the movies I’ve seen, and I make it a habit of drafting provocative, decisive reviews of each in my head as I leave a movie theater or unload the DVD player.
Over the weekend, I spent some time comping up a home page and an article page for a new site that will allow me to focus entirely on writing about movies and television. The idea is that, with a clear focus on only that kind of content, those posts will start slowly receiving a bit more attention. It was a lot of fun to do, but all the while I was working on it, I remained unconvinced that I could really devote the necessary energy to it. Even if I put it on a less rigorous posting schedule than the one that I maintain for Subtraction.com, I’m not sure it would gain enough momentum to develop the kind of audience I would like for it.
To Blog or Not to Blog
I’m still tinkering with the comps, but I’m really stumped over whether to go through the trouble of building and launching it at all. Would anybody read it? I doubt I would be able to bring over very many of the design- or technology-focused readers from this site, but there should be at least a few who like my writings on movies and TV enough to visit regularly. To build an audience requires, among other things, regular posting of attention-getting content, which requires, basically, lots more time than I have. The worst would be to invest all the time and energy that I pour into building weblogs (I’m relatively slow, I guess), only to let it languish after the initial enthusiasm peters out or my schedule gets increasingly crazy. Basically, I have the power of a press but not the energy to maximize its full potential.
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