Interesting timing, given a conversation going on elsewhere:
Jakob Nielsen's take on
Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes.
If you publish on many different topics, you're less likely to attract a loyal audience of high-value users. Busy people might visit a blog to read an entry about a topic that interests them. They're unlikely to return, however, if their target topic appears only sporadically among a massive range of postings on other topics. The only people who read everything are those with too much time on their hands (a low-value demographic).
Alrighty then. Personally, I enjoy topic-specific and wide-ranging blogs in about equal measure. Also, while I agree with his point that if you don't use your own domain name, you risk losing chunks of your audience, incoming traffic from links elsewhere, etc. when your hosting company decides to add pop-up ads on every page and you decide to leave, his first paragraph in that section leaves a little bit to be desired: "Having a weblog address ending in blogspot.com, typepad.com, etc. will soon be the equivalent of having an @aol.com email address or a Geocities website: the mark of a naïve beginner who shouldn't be taken too seriously." I've read plenty of blogs at dedicated domains that I wouldn't even remotely take as seriously as someone like, say,
Rivka. Personally, I care more about what you actually say than whether you're saying it at Blogspot/Livejournal/etc., but then I suppose that's why I'm neither a highly-paid usability consultant nor a "big name blogger", eh?
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