OTB Side Blogs
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James Joyner | Monday, March 6, 2006 |
After a month of mostly behind the scenes experimentation, today marks the official debut of three niche blogs under the OTB banner:
- OTB News: A compilation of links and short excerpts, sans commentary, of the news of the day. Quite often, something will be going on that I find noteworthy but it never makes the blog because I don’t really have anything to say about it. Or it gets stuck in my draft post queue and never sees the light of day. Or, I dash off a quick post but without much insight. Putting them on their own mini-blog will not only provide those links to readers but also preserve them long after they have expired at the source.
- OTB Sports: While OTB (The Original Blog) features sports commentary from time-to-time, I read a lot more about sports (especially the Dallas Cowboys, Atlanta Braves, and Alabama Crimson Tide) than I want to include here. This site will be a weblog in the original sense: A log of things of interest that I’ve come across on the Web related to sports. Sometimes, I’ll have commentary and analysis, sometimes just a link and an excerpt.
- OTB: Gone Hollywood: As has been increasingly clear from both my site referral logs and from the BlogAds order page, people are a lot more interested in what’s going on in the celebrity world than they are in the ins-and-outs of American foreign policy. This is especially true if there are photos of hot women involved.
There will also be celebrity-focused Caption Hollywood contests by Rodney Dill. The first one is up and running.
I’ll still occasionally post all of the above on the main site. Sometimes, a breaking news story is important enough to spotlight even though there’s not much to say about it. Sometimes, something going on in the worlds of sports and pop culture will merit commentary.
Over time, I hope to recruit beat reporters to cover regions and/or particular news outlets for OTB News and specific teams or niches for OTB Sports. While the former is commentary free, post authors are free to link to commentary on their sites or other blogs. If you’re interested, send me a note.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and infant daughter.
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As of right now, the RSS feeds for your side blogs are identical to the main blog.
Thanks Eric--That's something I need to fix.
So James, since I can't access my steveverdon.com e-mail at work....where do you want me blogging?
Steve:
Anywhere you want!
Keep blogging at OTB main.
If you would like a beat or beats (LA, California, business, etc.) for OTB News, it's yours.
If you would like a beat for OTB Sports, it's yours.
If you want to do some stuff at Gone Hollywood, that's cool, too.
Jay: Indeed! I actually talked to Kevin about it in person the other night.
I borrowed the sideblog idea from Kevin, although I had a whole series of niche blogs out on Blogspot for quite some time until my account mysteriously went away.
OTB Sports was at least "original" when I came up with the idea a month ago but by the time I got it implemented, Kevin had rebranded his defunct "SportsBlog" as another in the Wizbang network.
Blogging, like the NFL, is a copycat game. People naturally take ideas that others have used elsewhere and run with them. The Beltway Traffic Jam was more-or-less original but was so often copied as to be indistinguishable. Conversely, I copied caption contest idea from many places but, through attrition (and good work by Rodney in running them) wound up having one of the more prominent.
Probably the biggest difference between the OTB and Wizbang sideblogs will be that my author list will be smaller, as I don't envision opening it up to all comers. We'll see how that works out in the longer run.
Sounds almost like a Wiz of an idea!
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