The vanishing personal site
April 29th, 2008
Jeffrey Zeldman, musing on the vanishing personal site:
Our personal sites, once our primary points of online presence, are becoming sock drawers for displaced first-person content. We are witnessing the disappearance of the all-in-one, carefully designed personal site containing professional information, links, and brief bursts of frequently updated content to which others respond via comments. Did I say we are witnessing the traditional personal site’s disappearance? That is inaccurate. We are the ones making our own sites disappear.
Obliterating our own readership and page views may not be a bad thing, but let’s be sure we are making conscious choices. […]
I’ve been mulling over these issues lately, thinking about what to do with my sites. Food for thought…
April 29th, 2008 at 9:29 am
I keep meaning to pull content from my two blogs into my “personal site”.
gordonmclean.co.uk was started with a view of returning the kind of personal homepage that zeldman mentions. Just haven’t gotten round to it yet, lol
April 30th, 2008 at 12:25 am
I’m coming at the problem from a slightly different angle: I don’t use Flickr or any of the social networking sites (unless you count del.icio.us, which I regard as more of a really handy online bookmarking site than a social network), so the issue for me is whether I use different domains to hold different types of content.
For example, I’m thinking of using one of my domains to host pieces that don’t fit the classic linklog format (e.g. posts reviewing software, or the sort of film/TV review posts I don’t do round here any more), with perhaps only an ‘Elsewhere…’ link posted here in between the linklog entries, probably with distinctive formatting to help the reader skim over them - similar in spirit, if not necessarily in style, to the way Jason Kottke used to post his Remaindered Links in between more substantial posts. But then, do I include links to those posts in the Sore Eyes feed? If I do, the formatting won’t be visible to those reading my content via an aggregator, so should I also give them a distinctive subject heading or perhaps just provide a separate feed?
Part of me wants to post everything to one site; for my money the beauty of the weblog concept is that it can be a snapshot of all the things that engage the author’s interest or enthusiasm. On the other hand, the people who read my feed primarily for the links I post might not be terribly interested in 1,000 words on how well designed NetNewsWire is, or what I think of season 2 of Heroes now it’s finally showing up on free-to-air TV over here.
Alternatively - in the spirit of Zeldman’s observation about the shift to a widely distributed, loosely connected online presence - perhaps instead of writing a bunch of posts on my own site and hoping people find them, perhaps I should be looking to get more involved in commenting at/posting to online communities of people who share my interests, so that whatever I do write gets seen by a bigger audience than the one I’d likely attract at my own site.
As I say, food for thought…