Don't be weird

A couple of weeks ago, I linked to one of Seth Godin's free ebooks, Who's There?.

It was just tucked away in a summary post, so I thought it deserved more attention. The book talks about blogging, in particular focusing on how to make a successful viral blog. It's full of useful tips, and great advice that seems amazingly obvious once you hear it- the type of advice that Seth seems to be able to churn out effortlessly. It really made me think about why I have this blog and what I want to achieve with it. I'm still thinking, and I'm still not really sure.

I suppose in cold hard business terms, I want this blog to be successful and spread so that more people will be exposed to my software. Seth calls that a Viral blog. The thing is, some of my posts tend to fall into what he calls the "Cat Blog" category, when I just write about what I've been up to, or personal issues like my house or my wife's court case. There's a third category, the "Boss Blog", which is basically used to co-ordinate a team and keep everyone up to speed, I don't think I'm in that category, although I guess when I post about new software releases I'm heading there. I don't really know what category I'm in when I talk about video games, maybe a bit viral and a bit cat?

Anyway, there's no point over-analyzing, the basic fact is I just like having a blog. I try to keep most of the posts related to my business, useful or interesting links, and interesting game links. I hope that I pick up some regular readers and maybe an occasional user for my software, but as long as there's something interesting to read, a human face for my web sites, and a way for me to share links and ideas, I'm already happy.

My favorite line in the book was:-

Remember the most important rule of all: I'm busy. So if you weird me out or confuse me or disrespect me, I'm out of here.

I'm not planning to change the themes of this blog, but I am going to try a little harder not to weird anyone out.

One of the ways I'm going to do this is to start a blog or feed purely for announcing software releases, so that I can point customers to an RSS link without having to worry about filling their feed reader with my random thoughts. Anyone interested in only my serious, work related posts already has the option of following my blog on CodeSnipers instead of this, and I've just recently added a "What kind of blog is this?" link to make it easier to find out what to expect from me here.

I'll let you know how it goes...