Monday, January 5, 2009

The Future

I've been thinking a lot about the purpose of this blog.  As you may have noticed, I bought a domain... www.destratis.com  I've left the subtitle, "Jason Found This Interesting".  For a while now I've been feeling like that is far too broad for this blog.  But before I continue with the future of this blog, I'd like to take a quick look back at last year.

I learned a lot about blogging in 2008 - most of it from my friend Marty Holman.  Marty really pushed me to consider blogging and twitter.  Marty also had very kind words for me today at his site.

My most successful blog was:  My Vote For President
I enjoy politics.  I enjoy debate.  This post worked, but I'm not sure that I'm a political blogger.  And I guess that's my point.  I need to stick to my niche.

So the question is:  Should I narrow the focus of destratis.com to "Strategy for Churches in the Northeast" and leave some room for personal stuff of our growing family?  Or should I create a new blog for Strategy and leave destratis.com for family updates only?  I'm leaning toward the first option, but Erin reminded me that my faithful readers may not be interested in the Strategy content.  So let me know what you think.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

I personally love hearing about you , Erin and the boys( or soon to be). I also enjoy the music info. Keep it up!!

Unknown said...

I like plan 1 also - with the ability to link back and forth of course, but mostly separate blobs. People who go to one may not necessarily want to spend much time in the other.

Unknown said...

BTW - I said 'blob' on purpose...
you know, like the big thing that ate the diner in that movie... it has a life of its own.

Sara said...

I think if you go with option 2 you're making more work for yourself and lets be honest - 2 kids 2 blogs ain't happening! ha! Soooo go with option one and if people aren't into strategy blogs they can just skip it and ready the family entries or just read Erin's blog. ok that's enough from me. . . and for the record I'm cool with you trying to do a political blog once in awhile ;)

Anonymous said...

Well I read this last night and I tried to think about what I really enjoy in a blog.
Currently I subscribe to 25 different blogs. and I make a point of reading several others without subscribing... I probably should just subscribe to them... anyway.
The majority of the blogs I subscribe to or read are those that mix a little family with a little expertise with a little bit of randomness thrown in.
A family style blog is great for friends but not much more than that.
A blog showing your expertise in a field may attract a wider audience but I know those are the blogs I skip if I get backed up in my reading. If you really are an expert you will have something good tomorrow is my thought on skipping them.
But people like Raggamuffin soul I think do a great job of combining wisdom, family, and random, in a way that make you look forward to each new nugget.
My suggestion would be to make 4-5 Dominant categories (Family, Church strategy, political ramblings, my 9-5, etc.) and then tag the poo out of your posts. And make the tags searchable. You could even make each category a different page. either way it is 1 stop shopping and easy for every one to find the content they want.

That's my 2 cents

Anonymous said...

I would enjoy the strategy blog. Allow Erin to run the family blog. She's way better at it than you anyway.

Angela Straw said...

I say keep one blog, people will read the posts they want to. I enjoy your blogging.

Angela

Seth said...

I was going to suggest using categories/tags, but looks like Billy already did. Makes it easier to filter out certain stuff if you want to. It may be possible to even subscribe to only posts in one category or another, but I'm not sure about that.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I'm pretty much with Billy on this way. He said everything I was going to say and several things I wasn't smart enough to think of.