An old and dear friend of mine whined recently that my blog is not topical.

His rant was not just directed at my blog but at the blogosphere in general. He observed that there were a wide variety of folks who used their blogs to just make random nonsensical remarks that had no point. That their blogs were an excuse to write random crap that was of no interest, not even to the author 5 minutes after they got posted.

I thought about that.

So my first observation is that my blog’s title is Day to Day Nonesense: Kostadis Roussos’ musings on a random world. The readers is warned that the blog contents are going to be both random and nonesense. Am I off-topic then if my blog is full of nonesense and random contents?

But that’s a cop-out. The real question is: Is a blog with my topic worth having on the web? Is the world serviced by such a blog or is it just my vanity? Am I like the annoying person at the dinner party that talks and talks and talks about something no one else cares about?

The meta-question is, would it be better if I had a topical blog? What if I picked a topic and focussed on it for a long time?

I ran into two challenges.

The first is that the time investment in a blog has to be small. I have a life. I have a wife, dog and friends. A column is a significant investment of time and energy.

The second is that I am not sure what I would talk about. World Affairs? Software? Technololgy? Maybe something very narrowly focussed like storage management and data management. Or maybe a hobby? Again, I am not sure one more blog on these topics would add much more value than my current blog. Dave Hitz’s blog adds a lot of value because he is the EVP of NetApp, the other horse in the two horse race in the storage market. His opinions carry weight because of his role and because of who he is. Knowing more about how Dave thinks is a proxy to knowing more about how NetApp thinks. About the only topic I add weight to because of my role is storage management and I can’t talk about that …

But I agree with my friend. A random blog about random topics is not generally interesting to most people.

However … I have a large distributed family that reads my blog. I can use the blog as a convenient way to share information about my life to them. And they seem to like it.

So I’ll keep with my blog. And as for my friend … well he’ll probably ignore this blog entry, but he has a point, I really should create a topical blog. Focussed on a narrow topic that might be more broadly interesting than the 30 or so folks in my family who read this blog.