Jason Kottke: Scrutinizing Liberal Arts

     After reading the transcript from an interview with Jason Kottke by Rebecca Blood, I was able to grasp a greater understanding of blogging and what drives the writer to continue producing new content regularly. Jason Kottke is a passionate blogger for kottke.org who is willing to express his opinions about a variety of different topics that interest him. He differentiates himself from the likes of other blog formatted websites like ESPN and Droid Life because his topics of interest are not as specialized. I am glad Jason started his blog out on his own terms making him more relatable to the audience that have the same passion for a particular topic. When Jason was discussing what new bloggers can write about in a blog, I agree with starting off with a specific topic because there are a lot of people who need some form of structure to get started. Furthermore, Jason goes into how he displays his personal identity on the blog. For the purposes of our small class size, displaying personal information is not as big of a deal. For Jason, however, the sheer number of people visiting his blog would favor allowing a smaller about of personal information being exposed to the public. The question in the interview that funneled the greatest reaction from me was the one on advertising on his blog. I believe that adding advertisement banners are better than asking for donations from the readers. When asking for donations, I think it puts more pressure on the writer to satisfy what the reader wants to read instead of what the writer wants to write about. When an ad banner is used, the writer can say what he or she wants without worrying about trying to get more donations. The downside of ad banners for some people, on the other hand, is the credibility of the author is lost due them selling out to gain more money. Additionally, some people feel the content quality and interactions with readers slowly reduce. My personal opinion is that there is a reduction in the quality because the author will try to appeal to more people to increase visitors and ad revenue. It also makes the page more cluttered with unnecessary spam. Overall, Rebecca brings up good points about blogging that can help me and many others to understand blogs.