Birdscapes

Using the "Next Blog>>" function, I discovered a birdwatching blog entitled Birdscapes. I have two things to note.

1) I love the name. I like words that end in -scapes, and I like clever neologisms that end that way. You know, seascape, cityscade, spacescape (you know, spacescape is almost palidomic; if you allowed s's and e's to be equivalent, it would work). So birdscape is cool; it's the landscape of birds.

2) I sometimes wish I could sustain a blog that is pretty much only about a single topic. You know, like God Online (see sidebar) or Freakonomics (see sidebar) or foodie blogs (see sidebar) or any skecthblog or webcomic blog... I tried with the whole MMO thing, but I haven't played for two months now and even then I rarely felt moved to write. That makes updating difficult. Here is the problem: those people who your average read-but-not-widely blogger has following him or her are often of a diverse interest range, picked up through assorted comments and exchanges and just perhaps by the "Next Blog" function. A diverse-topic blog is more likely to retain such readers because even if every post is not interesting to them, some will be. Now, a single-topic blog is more likely to work on a massive-scale for the same reason, I presume, that chain restaurants, book series, and episodic TV shows work: familiarity and niche. So as much as I admire the neatness and professionalism of a single-topic blog, I realize that is a phenomenon that works best for large, popular blogs, and not little fish like me.

I mean, if I wrote entirely on religious stuff, my less religious readers might get bored. If I wrote on entirely literary analysis type stuff...well, Jon might not get bored. Would the rest of you? I'd say maybe, but that's not fair. Maybe you guys would find nerdiness interesting. I could say something like, if I wrote on gaming... but I don't play games anymore, it seems, and I never write about that here. If I wrote entirely about my writing process, I'd get nothing written and I might bore some of you away. If I wrote entirely about my life, I'd get bored, and I think that some people do enjoy my less-about-me stuff. See my point? Nothing that I currently write about would be interesting enough to please the readers I currently have (there are, what, about five of you, unless my family is still reading this...then it would be eight, right?). I know! I'll put up a poll, and you can tell me what you like! Not that I will change any of my habits accordingly, but it would be nice to see.

Wow. Somehow writing about Birdscapes turned into writing about me. Whoops.

3) Birdscapes, if you look at the profile, is part of a blogger group called Birds of a Feather, whose mascot is a turkery vulture (I like turkey vultures--they're cool!). Check them out too, why don't you?