Our blogs section really hasn't taken off the way that I've been hoping it would in terms of traffic, and so I just wanted to open a thread up to feedback as far as what types of stories you would like to read, and what you do and don't like about our current blogs.

There is too many blogs about stocks / shares in my opinion

To me i see daniweb as being primarialy a forum, thats what its good at and what most people come here to do.

AFAICT, when in search for a blogging service, people normally look for the ones which provide complete freedom in terms of blog posts. They might have blog posts related to their day to day happenings or on technical topics. Since Daniweb blogs, AFAIK, don't allow non-technical content and people normally are too lazy to maintain two blogs, hence the outcome.

Also, it depends a lot on the ecosystem of the community. Daniweb is mostly frequented by school / university kids looking for homework help or people trying to solve hardware configuration issues i.e. the ratio contributors to consumers is pretty low.

Some other reasons might be a lot of things going in life to bother with blogging or just plain old laziness [like me].

My personal choice for blog posts is something related to programming or some latest development in the software scenario rather than lowdown on the next version of MS Vista; YMMV.

I think the biggest problem right now is that the target audience of the forums and the blogs aren't really the same. From what I can tell, most of the blog traffic is generated from external sites, not from internal DaniWeb traffic.

I just don't think that tech news is really that popular amongst most of our members here. Not that there's anything wrong with tech news; your team of staff writers has been doing a fine job creating high quality content, but you've probably noticed by now that most of your staff writers stay in the blogs of DaniWeb, and most of the forum posters stay in the forums. The blogs and the forums are quite separate.

My guess would be that if the blogs started featuring more technical articles and howtos, you'd gain more of an audience from the DaniWeb forum members. On the other hand, the point is rather moot, because most of your staff writers specialize in tech news, so it's probably not feasible for them to suddenly shift gears and start cranking out tutorials and how-tos.

If you're going to make a blog, why would you make one on Daniweb, as opposed to some other blogsite or your own site?

There is no reason for people to do this. I would focus more towards tutorials done in a wiki-like fashion.

I almost never read any of those blogs because they rarely have anything that is interesting to ME to read. But after reading this thread just now I went to have another look -- and sure enough there were a few non-technical blog entries, such as the one written by Happygeek and our President-Elect Obama. I will pay more attention to the DaniWeb blogs if they become less geeky.

I think we need to look at two distinct things here:

What do members want to blog about themselves (as in what would make you start a blog here at DaniWeb instead of at Blogger for example)

and

What do members want to read other people blogging about (as in what stories do you want to read here from the existing team)

I certainly get the impression that most of my readers are coming in from outside of DaniWeb, which is not altogether a bad thing as it does bring the community exposure/advertising it would not otherwise achieve and hopefully helps inject new blood into the membership. That said, it would be great if more DaniWeb members were reading my output - so I am all ears and wearing my flame-proof jacket.

>If you're going to make a blog, why would you make one on Daniweb,
>as opposed to some other blogsite or your own site?
Exposure. If you make a blog on your own site, it can take months, even years before you build up a reader base that rivals the one that DaniWeb already has. Plus all sorts of external sites pull in the DaniWeb blogs RSS feed, such as Google News.

In addition to the things already said,
Daniweb isn't really known for it's blogging possibilities. I visit sites like reddit and digg etc frequently, but Daniweb's articles are seldom featured on these kind of sites, so the average blog reader (someone like me) doesn't even know that Daniweb-blogs exist. So perhaps as I suggested Davey a few months ago: make a big digg-it button with every blog that people like me can click and perhaps get some exposure to the blogs?

There is the ability to submit and share blog posts to sites such as Digg and Slashdot at the bottom of each posting. Just hover over the 'Share' button.