I have long wondered if I am doing myself a disservice by blogging whatever the heck I feel about in this space, under the singularly unimaginative title of “Churbuck.com”, and whether I should fork my blogging betwixt a professional-focus (really serious thoughts about marketing optimization, metrics, and engagement with social networks) or my typical Tourette’s Syndrome of blogging pictures of my toe sticking out of a holy sock or my dog’s shaved hindquarters
Let’s start with the name: “Churbuck.com”. Okay. So I have a weird last name and got in on the great domain landrush early in the game and have the ultimate vanity email address. Does that mean my blog has to be entitled the same as its address? How unimaginative. Let me consider some alternatives:
- Tongue Bath: dunno, came to me while watching the aforementioned dog chew himself into a coma.
- Caeocethes Scribendi: Ooh. Look. A dead language. This one means “The Itch to Write” which is about the only thing this blog is good for. Think of it as mental backscratcher.
- But I Digress…: shamelessly ripped off from Constantine von Hoffman
- Sweet Home Clamabama: given the importance of clamming strategies to this blog, I figured I’d recognize it in the title
Rejected ideas:
- Anything with an interCap and a lowercase beginning, eg. “marketingBlather”
- Anything remotely “Web 2.0” or for that matter “dot.bomb.” Flooz? Beanz? Yelp? These are utterances of pre-verbal toddlers or dogs in cartoons
Now, the hard part is to determine whether to blog in several different places. A professional blog where I ruminate about multivariate testing and optimization processes for display advertising, blog monitoring and viral engagement; and a demented blog for posts about roadside crosses, dog butts, and special clam rakes.
For the time being — as the man said — if you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything. So I won’t do anything.
FWIW, I don’t think most folks pay attention to blog titles. I find new readers tend to come from places like Technorati, Digg, Google, etc. where the content of a particular post attracted their interest. If the content’s cool and fits the bill they read somemore, then maybe if it’s really good they come back again.
The best tricks for getting users to come in:
1. Top ten lists – anything in top ten list format gets read – the wierder the better.
2. Train wrecks attract – systematic dismemberment of the clueless always demands attention.
3. There can never be enough posts about about hairless dog butts, rat assassination, creative gopher genocide, three legged weasels or the like…really.
4. As you’ve noted before – do a Dvorak – piss off the Mac users and watch the stats go through the roof.
I’ve learned the trick from dealing with my daughters, keep them entertained, and they won’t notice their actually learning something along the way.
i agree that titles are relatively unimportant – but of course i would, since i’m writing on something called ‘tecosystems’.
but anyway, as for forking the blog, i’ve seen any number of people before consider the same thing and i’m against it. i’ve actually had people suggest that i do the same.
what tends to happen to folks that do this, as far as i can tell, is that they end up torn over where to post “tweener” items or whether to cross-post and it acts as a throttle. a couple of the folks i know that have attempted this have reintegrated down the line.
i’ve always assumed that folks that don’t care about certain things i blog about can just skip them.
the other approach that some take is categories; have a single blog, but set up a category for the so-called serious content so that folks can just sub to that.
just my two cents.
the Essence of Churbuck are the seamless, stream-of-consciousness transitions between web metrics and shaved dog butts. You didn’t ask for a vote, but I say keep the blog as is.
I agree with both O’Grady and O’Regan (a lot O’People here).
I happened hear by chance in search of Cotuit links and quickly became a follower of your writing based on the content and style. You have several different categories that are of interest to me and I prefer to filter what I read just by skimming the feed titles. I would not want to subscribe to multiple feeds for your multiple categories. Can you provide a category based feed? Some on the other hand may consider it beneficial if the are only interested in say “metrics”.
So in conclusion: “Si fractum non sit, noli id reficere” – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
And remember “Quid quid latine dictum sit, altum videtur” – Anything said in Latin sounds profound
Category feeds seem very doable, I’m just too dense and pre-coffee to figure it out.
Thanks to all for their suggestions. I will leave things alone.
We’ve had category based feeds for a couple years on the Reel-time blogs.
http://www.reel-time.com/blogs/cahill – note the rss button next to each category. Hence I believe it’s a built in function of wordpress that’s not exposed in most themes – since I don’t remember writing that bit of code..