Slipping Out of Our Public Niches
Yesterday Tim O'Reilly did not post about Web 2.0 or technology per se. He posted about a dream, O'Reilly Radar > A Dream of Peace.
The post stands on its own about the importance of peace for our children and future generations. But what struck me was how good it felt to read Tim in another context, out of his normal "public niche."
Yesterday I went walking with two of my neighbors, a little exercise and a little stop at the bakery for goodies and tea. To me, the walk not only fulfilled my promise to myself of "moving" daily, but the conversation with two cool women (if you are reading this R and S, hello!).
One of my walking companions has become interested in blogging and we talked about blogs that focus and blogs that wander all over the place. I shared that I am comfortable wandering all over the place intellectually, but that I don't blog about my family. I'm happy to expose myself, but not them without their participation and interest. So my niche is pretty wide, but the boundaries are very clear to me.
Thus, if you don't know me in another context, you won't know much about my family life. But you might have a pretty good idea about what I like to think about when you read my blog.
I appreciate the value of targetted blogs. Focus, in a time and attention starved world, is a gift. But those occasional forays outside of our niches, to me, add a layer of humanity, another view of the writer that, upon subsequent reads, changes the "voice" I hear from them in my head.
posted by Nancy White at 8:47 AM
2 Comments:
I've been dealing with this lately too. First, we found that, in travel blogging for a while, the niche was us. I think this is the wrong term, but we found that we couldn't "hide behind" our niche or our professional area of expertise. We just had to do our best to share what we learned along the way.
Second, now that I'm back blogging on Common Craft, I struggle about how much to talk about the trip. It taught me a lot, but I don't know how much is too much. Do Common Craft readers care about travel? Does it matter?
Lee, I'm not objective because I count you as a personal friend and I love travel. But it seems to me that the lessons or learnings from your trip have very real connections to your Common Craft work. So maybe weaving them here and there has real power. It kind of gives another language or nuance to the subject matter.
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