Blogging Format Ideas

I'm always interested in blogging formats... how people use their blogs.

Some focus on personal stuff. Some on business. Others on athletics. I have no focus... a format roughly called lifeblogging.

Some blog a lot. Some blog once a day. Some blog when something compelling happens in their life. Some store up happenings for a week/month/quarter and then do one big post covering it all.

Some use pictures. Others video. Or podcast.

Some use comedy. Some are modest. Some are dramatic. Some link out a lot. Some are anonymous.

A person's blog format is unique. Often one's format begins via imitation. But it almost always becomes individual.

Behind a person's blog format is often a clue to why they blog. I'm big on a balance between capturing my life to trigger memories of it when I'm old and connecting with friends/family now.

I used to have a blogging format where the entry title was very important. I used to think in terms of a post. Often I'd break the day up into four or five individual posts. This followed the atomic notion of datablogging.

Then a few years ago I began doing a lot more microblogging... quick updates. Shooting from the hip. Camera phone images. I wrote software to facilitate the collection of the updates and called it QuickPost. I've never fully integrated it into the ui of datablogging but it's live in all accounts... I've blogged about it before and have seen some folks using it from time to time.

I certainly can't come up with a title when I'm standing on a subway train and just want to capture something like "heading back to the hotel." Aggregating such microupdates into a single post for each day is a smart play.

But over time I've ended up with a few years worth of posts that are somewhat harder to organize. The title has some importance in the organization task. Search results inside of the datablogging platform, rss titles, related entries, calendar displays, on this day summaries... they all use the title of the post. A title like "Monday, September 22nd, 2005" doesn't tell me much about what happened that day.

So there's a balance between ease of blogging and future value of what's blogged.

I'm not gonna give up the microupdates but I do want to create a format that's a little more rigid and that helps me follow the threads of my life.

I'm imagining 80+ Me looking back through my life. Microupdates can be of incredible value because they'll transport me to the moment. But without context many of them may end up to be of dubious value. Signal to noise issue again.

Context is critical. The hope with microupdates is that if I do them often enough the threads of my life become self-apparent. Like when I traveled to Connecticut pre-Ironman. It was clear that Germ Phobia was in full effect because I microblogged frequently and germs were in every update.

But in general I don't keep that much of a running thread. I'm losing a good bit of stuff. If my personal task is to capture my life for Future Me then I've got to do a better job.

I'm thinking about something like this: I have a separate section on the site called, I don't know, Core Focuses or something like that. Each night I take a few minutes to summarize the most important thing that happened in the three areas of my life (family/friends, work, athletics). And then maybe I'd also summarize the biggest thing that happened in the world.

These wouldn't be huge summaries. Just a sentence could do the trick. But they'd provide context and a consistently running storyline to everything else that I collect... pictures, microupdates, training data, etc.

I may need to add some features to facilitate this. Or maybe I'll keep it text-based and simple. I'll noodle it for a while and may start something around the beginning of the year.