What should I do with my blogs?

This is some sort of brainstorming about what to do about the proliferation of blogs I have these days. But let me explain!

So I have many blogs these days:

• Tao Takashi about Second Life in english
• dev.comlounge.net is about Plone and low level coding stuff (but these days also more highlevel social networks stuff in english)
• mrtopf.de is my german blog which I started in order to connect more with the german community
• mrtopf.tv is my first video blog for more personal stuff
• comlounge.tv is a more technical oriented Videoblog mainly about Plone and Python but was also supposed to have a wider topic range.
• mrtopf.de/podcast is my german podcast (well, 3 episode in 6 months.. but I  hope to be more active there).

Some history

Now why is this? Probably all this came historically. First was dev.comlounge.net where I posted stuff about Plone mainly geared towards the Plone community (which aggregates on planet.plone.org). This sort of died at some point until I revived it recently. Then I had the Tao Takashi SL blog which I started because I thought SL is a good topic to have a blog about as nearly every minute something new is happening (indeed this is my most active blog since a month ago or so). In the meanwhile I also started to do video stuff which I posted on mrtopf.tv which is basically a Blogger.com blog but ftpd to my domain (which never worked that well). And once I started to film conferences which were more about Plone I started plone.tv which is now comlounge.tv as the first one went over to Nate for videos from many people out of the Plone community.

And then I noticed that I actually don’t know anybody in the german scene which is why I started mrtopf.de/blog (actually revived my old homepage and installed WordPress).

So in fact I am on two planets, the Plone planet and the Second Life Planet which means that people probably expect mostly on-topic posts. That was my reason why I did not mix everything. Add languages to that.

What’s the problem?

So now I have a problem because there is not real starting point when you want to look for me. This also means that I would have to put 10 URLs on my business cards. This is not really great. Thus I created mrtopf.de/connect which makes sense but probably is still somewhat annoying and some redirection.

The main problem though is that I noticed that I crosspost a lot these days. This might mean that something is wrong. Additionally I talked to Stephanie Booth who has the same problem with language and she said that one blog converts better than several (which is of course more about marketing but isn’t a blog also self-promotion? I guess you want to have readers otherwise you wouldn’t do it. Especially you want to have conversations). So this is probably true, too.

Actually I’d even need more blogs, because I have roughly 4 topics (Second Life, Plone, Social Networks and the rest) and 2 languages which makes 8 blogs. Add 2 videoblogs and 1 podcast in 2 languages to it and you get an additional 6 blogs. I could even also start to divide between low- and highlevel, which basically means code snippets or Python tips which makes 28 blogs then.

Now it’s obvious that it probably does not make sense to divide all this into blogs.

What’s the solution?

Now this is the question. There 2 main requirements:

1. People on topic specific blog aggregators might not want me to stay roughly on topic (although I personally don’t mind some broader range on those blogs)
2. some people might want to stay in one language, esp. not everybody might want to read german if they don’t understand it.

So my thinking is this:

• Put everything in one blog (which will probably be mrtopf.de)
• Create categories “English” and “German” as well as topic based ones like “Second Life” or “Plone”
• Create two categories “World of SL” and “Planet Plone” and put the feeds of them through FeedBurner on the planets.
• Create categories “Videoblog” and “Podcast” and post everything on the blog, too

Some blog posts I might even do in both languages although I think that germans theoretically should be able to understand english. They would even be allowed to comment in german 😉

For german posts I might put some summary on top like Stephanie suggested.

One exception is probably COM.lounge TV which might stay it’s own blog as it’s more company branded but I might crosspost interesting videos on the main blog.

So the questions are now:

• Would people be annoyed by sometimes reading english or german although it’s not their first language or they do not understand it anyway? Will this drive readers away?
• Would people mind if I sometimes post lowlevel developer blurbs? I guess this wouldn’t happen that often anyway. Those will probably be mostly english.
• How do I get all my readers over here? Most of the feeds go through Feedburner, so that’s easy but because the SL-Blog is WordPress-hosted not everything goes via Feedburner.
• Should I copy some posts over (like those from the web2expo or some IMHO “important” posts?)
• What will iTunes say if I change my videoblogging content/URLs? well, they go through Feedburner, too.
• How many germans actually would have a problem with english?

Your opinion?

So what’s your opinion? Do you have similar problems? How did you solve this? Would like to hear more 🙂

Technorati Tags: languages, mrtopf, taotakashi, blogging, blogs