Without a doubt the most popular blogging approach is just picking and sticking to a topic. Specialization makes a lot of sense. There is a lot of competition on the web, so making it easy for a reader to know what they will find on your site is critical. The key is to choose something you would feel happy to blog about; posting is hard enough to keep up with when you are interested in your topic.
Today’s example is Flowing Data. From the About page:
FlowingData explores how designers, statisticians, and computer scientists are using data to understand ourselves better – mainly through data visualization. Money spent, reps at the gym, time you waste, and personal information you enter online are all forms of data. How can we understand these data flows? Data visualization lets non-experts make sense of it all.
Like many high frequency (i.e. lots of posts) topic blogs the vast majority of Flowing Data’s content comes from examples pulled from other sources. The value comes from not only presenting the work of others but adding the blogger’s own slant on the material being presented. Nathan Yau has been blogging for four years, consistently, on the same topic.
Even the best bloggers question whether they will be able to keep up with their blogs, but day by day, week by week, they build something. Want to see how a blog, and blogger, develops? Go back to the early days of a blog’s archives, you’ll see a progression. Like so many things, you can’t tell if you would be good at something until you prove it to yourself.
I would like to move on to other things so this will be the last in this mini-series on blogging approaches. Up next…Web Analytics.
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