I follow a raft of RSS feeds, and I split them into categories one of which is “Profession”. That includes all sorts of blogs on different topics, loosely assembled by the rule that they may have items of note that relate to my profession (agile development, UI design, grammar, and so on).

Many of those blogs are ’single’ blogs and so inbetween posts about how to use a Wiki as a single source publishing system, I get the occasional baby photo. It’s not a big deal but it still irks.

My Blog is about whatever floats through my brain.

My ‘other’ Blog is about my profession, technical communications.

Simple, but hard to maintain!

(Thanks for talking about this — as the blog world has gone money, it’s something I struggle with.)

Pete - I do have many blogs (or outputs) but the question for me isn’t so much how I can do it as whether I - or anyone working in a commercial environment - should do it at all. Chris touched on that point in his comment, above.

In that sense, it’s potentially much easier (less sensitive?) to be a startup, but even then, for consultants of any size of operation there’s a tough balancing act between speaking publicly enough about topics that you get noticed and trusted about them and keeping the good stuff for the clients who are paying you.

Come to think of it, you already have many “blogs” in the loosest sense - Tumblr, Delicious, Flickr, etc. If you can figure out a way to run a blog about your work stuff that doesn’t get in the way…

While I crush a lot of subjects into my personal blog I don’t think it’s necessary for one person to only have one blog. You live in many words (family, home, work, pub, hobbies, etc) so why not have many blogs?

That, critically, is the question. When I used to (rarely) blog I never blogged about work, for the same reasons you list above. Someone pays me for what I know, and I want to respect that and save what I think of that has value for them.

Somewhere in my head is a longer post tying this up with the ‘freeconomy’ and the myth that monetisation is something to jeer at, and that can be avoided in your start-up business model and yet still pay the rent. Something about the balance between giving everything away (whether ideas or full-blown products) to contribute to the network, and yet still retaining ownership over some value to be able to actually have a business/job that produces income. But I just don’t have the time to write it. And I’m not sure I believe that equilibrium exists.