I spent this Saturday at home. Working on web stuff. Much of the work is done in background. Managing sites, adding them to tracking services, small cosmetic changes (the sidebar font is smaller now !).
I also wrote an update to TokyoClubbers.com, a site that is about a topic I sometimes touch on my blog (more on the older one thought).

On the web, popularity is the game. Nowadays, blog format is very popular but blogs are often just diaries, sites centered about an individual.
An individual may say interesting things on his or her blog, but unless a blog isn't clearly focussed on a specific topic, it's not easy to gain popularity.
I find this dispersion of focus frustrating. Keeping everything in one site helps to keep in touch with friends that stop by the blog. But to the outsiders, the blog has no personality, no meaning.

This reminds me of various restaurants around where I live. Although pretty much int he center of Tokyo, my town is famous for being a very quiet, mostly a residential area. Here most of the restaurants and bars are rather small and are based on usual customers.

There is one shop that opened a couple of years ago, but that to this day, I still have no idea what is it about ! I think it's some sort of restaurant, but I always see a bunch of people sitting inside ina circle and with no food ! The door is usually open (strange for those friends-oriented shops), but in the evening often there is some video (usually Japanese animation) being projected on a semi-opaque sheet placed the glass that covers the front of the shop.
I pass by everyday and I think: "it's a shop, but it looks like somebody's home ! If I try to get it in, it's probably going to be very odd.. yet it's a shop !!!"
This is very much like I see web sites.. some are presented as everyone's web site, some are so filled with personal stuff that visitors passing by can't possibly feel like they would come around again.

Back to the dispersion of focus thing... I think that it's sometimes a better idea to subdivide information across different sites and then possibly aggregate (with news feeds) this information again in some sort of personal site.
The drawbacks are that:

• Information sharing is mono-directional: all my friends read all I write here and there, but their comments are trapped on the specific site where the post is
• It's more time consuming because one has to make an effort to maintain more than one blog
• Not everything can be divided so neatly. Some things may involve more than one topic

With "tags" being popular, I suppose that one could just keep one blog and create a virtual division by providing different entry pages which would do nothing but grab all entries that include a specific tag.

There is more than that however. One still needs other structures. Something more specific than just a list of blog entries.
An example is the Club List page in TokyoClubbers.com. The site itself may well turn into some sort of weekly report, basically a blog, but at the same time, those reports need to be associated with a more structured information. Information to which one would link to constantly.
Perhaps here comes again the bliki thing...

My conclusion for today is that there is a lot that can and should (someday) be done to organize information. Active steps that an individual has to do, rather than just streaming out blog posts and expect web searches to do the rest of the work.
For example: what I wrote here today would be a lot more useful if I actually extrapolated the logic and put it down in the form of lists and sublists with hyperlinks.. which is mostly what Wikis are for.

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