Professional Blogs Versus Personal Blogs

As part of planning for a client project, I spent some time on a whole bunch of blogs that I would ordinarily never visit … mommy blogs.  The phenomenon of Moms (and Dads for that matter) going online to blog about their daily experiences with parenthood is growing.  There have been a few reports about this over the past few months on this audience.  The experience has started me thinking about whether there may be a fundamental difference between professional and personal blogs (though not necessarily the blogger’s personalities).  As far as I can tell, there are several big differences immediately obvious:

1. Personal blogs have a ton more comments.  When I visit some of the well trafficked professional blogs such as Micropersuasion, they will have at most 10-20 comments.  That seems to be the cutoff to signify a "hot post."  On some mommy blogs, 20 comments are ordinary – and some posts had more than 60 comments.
2. RSS Feeds are not as popular.  I have posted before about the power of RSS feeds and the promise I see with them.  Many of the authors of personal blogs that I visited seemed far more interested in getting others to add them to their blogrolls than in syndicating RSS feeds.  Many personal blogs did not even offer an RSS feed at all.
3. Blogger personality is more transparent.  Many blogs featured links to their personal profiles as described by Bloginality — and photo postings were common on many sites.  This is not a particularly insightful observation, but one that was interesting because of how hard some bloggers who have more "professional" blogs seem to work at keeping their personality out of their posts.

As our planning and strategy progresses, we will work on an audience segmentation for blogging moms online.  Lookout in the near future for a post on a matrix for how these moms might be defined.