Multiple Blogs

As I type this e-mail I have three blogs. Each with a different target and content goal but all run by me with my own opinions and thoughts - is this the right approach?

Ok lets take a step back. I wrote my first blog post about three years ago on a blog built using Blogger (I think it was before Google brought it) and a standard template.

At the time, and up until October 2006 the blog contained my thoughts on pretty much every subject from politics and news to entertainment and new media.

But last October I decided to try something different, I moved all the political talk to a new blog with a different design, style, domain and ethos - but it sort of happened by accident.

Now it looks like I’ve done it again. I’ve just launched another new blog (well soft launched, I want to get some content in there first), again with a different design, style, domain and ethos.

The first new blog, the political one is 5tracks.eu and was launched because I’d brought a domain for something else and then changed my mind.

This time I found a cool theme - the iTheme, had a domain name doing nothing and so decided to launch a blog about television - reviews of shows and next generation TV stuff.

But before I get too far into the whole ‘multiple sites’ thing I decided to step back and take a look at whether I really wanted to have multiple blogs looking at narrow subject fields.

That sort of thing is fine if you run a media empire and have staff to write on each of the blogs but when it’s you, on your own trying to think of enough to say it becomes a drag for me and the reader.

The new blog is at grumpygeeks.co.uk incase you want to take a quick look.

To multiply or not to multiply

Although I like the idea of having one blog for politics, one blog new media and another for television I have some serious concerns about it.

1) I’m already struggling to keep up with two blogs
2) I don’t have enough of a ranking on one blog to split it off
3) My opinion isn’t really very important

So as we speak I have three blogs - one for general new media stuff, this one, my tried and tested three year old blog (although there is only a years worth of posts on this incarnation), the one I’ve been writing in the most.

Then there is the political blog, a place to express my own opinions on political stories and keep it away from the new media, geek stuff.

And finally the third, the blog I’ve just launched that was inspired by a theme and little more, the blog with a cool domain name for talking about television.

My main concern though, more so than workload is traffic. At the moment I have a Technorati ranking of 22 on Up Your Ego and 18 on 5tracks.

If I merged the two blogs together would my ranking increase overall or would it not make much of a difference? Would I just end up losing the 18 from the political blog?

What about further splitting the content of Up Your Ego into this new blog - if I manage to build a ranking and user base on that blog would I be once again further splitting the potential reader of Up Your Ego or creating a new community of people using both blogs?

The Design

The main reason I can give you for wanting to keep Grumpy Geeks is the domain, the name and the template but I could create a GrumpyGeeks section of Up Your Ego for reviews and change the theme of Up Your Ego to reflect the GG one.

How often is too often when changing the design of a blog? The current template is fairly recent and I happen to like it a lot but I also like this new one.

What should I do - re-design this blog and drop the other blog, keep the other blog and the current design or leave things the way they are and leave the other blog to die?

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