I am eclectic
I write posts on topics that are all over the place. Why does it seem like there are no other blogs like me? Am I really that special?
No, it’s because the more narrowly-focused the blog, the more easily it will gain readership. For someone to become interested in this blog, they have to, in addition to liking my writing, share at least 20–50% of my interests. (People who share fewer interests will be bored by 95% of the posts and eventually stop coming, even if they really like the other 5%.) But on a single-topic blog, you get people with all sorts of different interests, who happen to share the one interest common to most of the posts. (Unfogged, for those familiar with it, is less eclectic than you might think on first impression—its topics are liberal politics, sex, humor, relationships, and pop culture. Not exactly an esoteric collection.)
The reason I don’t know of any blogs as eclectic as mine is that none of them have any traffic. And the ones that I have come across have been so boring as to hardly make an impression on me. Well, there go my dreams of being a B-list blogger.
BTW, major periodicals are successful despite their range of subject matter because (a) journalists are paid to write in an entertaining way about subjects readers are unfamiliar with. Writing for a lay audience is something experts don’t often do for free, and when they do it’s usually only on their main subject of expertise, so the eclectic blogs tend to be a bit more in-groupy (and, of course, less expert). Also, (b) the mass media are sources of original reporting, and (c) periodicals come in chunks all at once, so ignoring all of the articles you’re not interested in is less annoying than with blogs. Plus any number of smaller reasons.
