kilian on blogging

Yesterday I decided to use my daily walk to check out the local (new-to-me) library. Twenty minutes. That's nice! I picked up two books (though goodness knows I don't need more books hanging around waiting to be read - I guess that's just what you do when you're a bibliophile *sigh*).

One of them was Writing for the Web 3.0 by Crawford Kilian. Interesting stuff for bloggers and others who write web content. I went straight to the section on blogs and discovered a categorization of personal blogs that had never occurred to me: Introvert and Extrovert.

According to Kilian, personal blogs in the Introvert category are mostly about the author's personal life. They talk about the ups and downs of relationships, jobs and family life, often with a self-deprecating tone. Sprinkled in here and there are posts about triumphs, good times etc. He claims these blogs have designs that are often hard to read, gray text on dark or white text on black. The main reason for the existence of these blogs is not so much for the reader as for the writer to have a place to vent.

Personal blogs in the Extrovert category focus more on the blogger's surroundings. They may deal with the environment the writer lives in (city or countryside), or the industry in which he/she works. He gives as an example of a successful extrovert blog Adventures of a Big White Guy Living in Hong Kong.

Of course I immediately asked myself - what kind of blog is mine? Extrovert - I think, with a few introverted posts thrown in? By his definition, what kind is yours?

Crawford Killian writes several blogs too: Writing for the Web - a companion to his book, Ask the English Teacher - about English usage, H5N1 - about avian flu, Neat Stuff - about web discoveries, plus seven more (linked on right sidebar under "My blogs" on his 'Writing for the Web' site.). My question would be, when does he find time to teach his Capilano College classes?