Most blogs seem to fit into one of two categories: those that offer personal yet publicly-available journals for their owners, and thost that offer original or collected/filtered news and commentary for niche audiences. Countless examples of the former can be found through sites like Livejournal; some of my and/or Dan’s favorite examples of the latter include Gizmodo, Joystiq, Kotaku, The Comics Reporter, Defamer, and “news posts” through online comics like Penny Arcade. When we were talking about what kind of content to put on Doombot, I made it pretty clear to Dan that I wanted it to have some sort of focus, as the best blogs (or at least our favorites) all have a pretty clear theme – video games, comic books, tech news, Hollywood movies, whatever. The last thing I wanted was to have a site where we just posted every day to announce to the world what we had for lunch; simply stealing links from a variety of other pop culture blogs seemed only one step above that. It is ironic, then, that once we got things going around here, we’ve pretty much only posted what I would have called the bottom of the blogging barrel.

I have a somewhat different perspective now, as well as a different idea of what the point of this blog should be. I have seen some really good personal sites, sites that are created to be read and are interesting to read. I can’t recall the URL now, but a friend and former professor of mine sent me a link to the blog written by a woman who was in our class; she has since joined the Peace Corps, and is using her blog to chronicle her daily life and interactions in (I think) Tanzania. It was a letter to her friends, an ongoing essay about living in a foreign place, and a sincere, involving story. I have to imagine that it was somehow cathartic for her, as well; and given that there are so many web sites and that you don’t need to flip through the pages of one to skip to the next chapter, I can’t say that anyone’s personal, cathartic page is getting in my way at all. Some other sites mix personal revelation with some other creative element, such as PostSecret, an excellent blend of written confession and visual expression; assuming that it’s real (and I want to believe it is, so I will assume this), the anonymous contributors somehow manage to take the voices of some universal and incredibly relatable personalities, offering some statements that may feel incredibly familiar. Personal confession and narrative sites serve a function, and I understand the vast difference between writing for yourself and writing about yourself for a friend or an audience. I’ve tried talking to myself; it helps me sort my thoughts, but it’s not as useful as actually having a conversation. And anyway, autobiographies and memoirs seem to be gaining some ground in bookstores, perhaps due to the commercial and critical success of stories that effectively target some nebulous 20-30something urban, creative (hipster?) crowd, such as Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (which I would’ve given the Pulitzer to over Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, though that was a good book too). So basically, I don’t mean to imply that specialized sites offering content to a niche audience are somehow superior to personal or autobiographical sites.

The best personal blogs, in my opinion, tend to have a single mind directing them (PostSecret being somewhat unique in that regard), which makes such a format less appealing for a collaborative project like we envisioned Doombot to be. Even though a personal site can be well done, then, it’s not really what we’d all like to be doing. Sites that that offer creative content and social/commercial commentary frequently target a fairly narrow audience, topic, or industry rather than attempting to reach out to a broader audience. I assume this is because it’s easier to do one thing well than to do many things well, and any given person is going to have multiple interests that can be best addressed by the sites that address each interest exclusively. After all, it’s not like it will cost you extra to bookmark five pages rather than one, unlike when you collect information from multiple print sources.

Many interests, however, tend to overlap, so some pages can reasonably address several different interests (or media, or industries, or what have you). Such interests can be roughly categorized by the social subgroups that makes up their audiences (nerds, goths, men in blue-collar jobs, stay-at-home moms, etc.). I’ve often wondered whether entertainment media have some formal properties that draw together audiences, or if the books you read and movies you watch just come down to convenience in social situations. I mean, why is there such a massive overlap between comic book fans and video game fans? Is there something about these media that reaches out to audiences who are (traditionally, stereotypically) bright but socially awkward? Is it just that these are the media where you can find power fantasies, sold in the places that welcome nerds? Whatever the case, between the four of us here at Doombot, we seem to have too many interests (related though they may be) to focus our attention too narrowly. We once tried making a comic strip together, but it was an uneven venture in some ways – it was an exercise in writing, cartooning, Photoshop use, programming, and more. It gave us all something to contribute, but some tasks were more inherently creative and interesting than others. When I decided that I wasn’t getting anything out of one of my contributions anymore – the cartooning – it couldn’t continue. Ideally, then, Doombot would provide us with a new creative outlet that would engage all of us somehow.

What you are reading now, of course, is not the realization of this vision. This is to be expected, though, I think, and is not necessarily a bad thing. We’ve had this domain name for a long time, and we haven’t done much with it. For a long time, we had an intentionally cryptic placeholder image with meaningless numbers. We discussed replacing that with an animated gif that said “Loading…” and had some equivalent of the animated spinning wheel. (Tony, who is more clever and evil than I am, suggested coding something in Flash for this that would display an actual loading bar that would have 99% as an asymptote that the bar would get infinitely close to but never reach.) We also discussed making this a sort of general, once-a-day content site for various kinds of creative content, sort of like McSweeney’s web site, only (presumably) geekier, and with the potential of hosting updates with images as well as text (which is the one thing I personally feel McSweeney’s should be doing differently on their site).

We haven’t abandoned the idea of doing a more specific, content-driven kind of site. We realized, though, that we weren’t doing it, and that it would be better to have something going on with the page instead of nothing. On the face of it, this is precisely the philosophy that I hate about corporations and terrible media franchises – really, nothing in our cash-driven, media-saturated environment should exist simply for the purpose of prolonging its own existence. It clutters the world unnecessarily and is ultimately a waste of time for those involved, who could be moving on to somehow more effective and relevant ventures. I can’t really give many examples of what I mean without running a pretty good risk of it coming back to bite me on the rear, but let’s just say that I’ve been involved in that kind of venture myself a few times. I’m of the mind that any venture should have a mission other than just to exist, and when you take a moment to reflect on how your own little venture is doing, you should be honest about how it’s doing in its mission. If your mission is to serve a community that doesn’t exist and is unlikely to find you, the venture is failing. If your mission is to amuse a small group of friends with links, well, it’s not much of a venture, but at least it’s a fairly achievable mission.

I don’t think I speak just for myself, though, when I say that our mission with Doombot for the time being is just to use this as an exercise in doing something rather than doing nothing. We’re trying some ideas out and seeing how they fit. It may lead to a new direction for Doombot eventually, but who knows – we might decide that what we enjoy most about this is just working together on something, and so we’ll go make a graphic novel in our spare time or start a web design/copywriting business to keep us busy over the summer. Personally, I hope we figure out a way (and fast) to make this a web site that Kai and Tony will actually want to contribute to as well, as the traditional blog format certainly isn’t drawing them out. (Confidential to Kai and Tony: That’s an open invitation, by the way, to post whatever the heck you guys want. I’m personally really curious to see any kinds of graphics stuff you might have been working on lately, though I understand you might not have much you can show outside work. But I say, hey, feel free to post links to old movies or games you made in school or whatever. Hey, maybe I’ll do that myself to get the ball rolling…)

In other words, this is an idea space, and I’m pretty curious to see where it leads us. That said, I think I got all the griping out my personal life out of the way, so I won’t bother posting that kind of thing anymore. You may or may not have noticed that I was actively trying to write that content in a way that people would find interesting to read. I only did one draft, though, and haven’t gone back to reread it, so I’m not assuming it worked. It was a (personally) valuable exercise in the spirit of what we’re doing here, though, so hopefully I can be forgiven for my ramblings.

Personally, I think I could be comfortable using this for awhile as just an open forum to share personal thoughts, links, and creative projects among friends. It’s very hard to conceive of participating in an indefinitely-long creative project with an audience of strangers, which in turn would require attention above and beyond my already pretty overwhelming duties as a student (or summertime designer). I’ve opened up the comments on this thread as part of another, ongoing experiment in actually inviting more people to contribute than the contributors; so what do you think? Not just about this blog, but about blogs in general – I’m interested to know what kind of blogs and other sites people read, whether anybody reading this contributes to a blog or other web site, whether anyone here would come back if we changed it or if we (as your personal friends) weren’t involved at all. Don’t be shy – it’s still a young blog, and the only person I missed (who emailed me to tell me so) when I listed all our readers in another post was Chris Collins. (Sorry, Chris. Congrats on the wedding!)

So: your turn.