A home is not a mere transient shelter: it’s essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it. — H. L. Mencken

I started this article the way I have started every Connected Internet article I’ve written since my workplace went internet-free. It’s the last day of my weekend and my wife is away at her part time job, leaving me at home with the just-turned-three year old in the next room watching Noggin or Qubo on the bigscreen. The disgruntled, angst-ridden 14 year old is upstairs in his bedroom, probably taking a nap because I have revoked his Xbox Live privileges and he has no reason to exist without Halo 3. This after a phone call with his summer school teacher this morning in which I discovered he was slacking off and seriously behind with only a week left of summer school.

Everything squared away for me to take a couple of hours to fulfill my weekly commitment to CI, I sat at the computer with absolutely no idea what I am going to write. Every now and then I will get a flash of insight, and have an article half written in my head by the time I sit down in front of the computer, but usually I go in with no clue what I’m going to do, hoping for some stream of consciousness magic to take place in my subconscious that will generate something that will be of interest to others.

I usually fire up iTunes for some background noise, and today as I was scanning through my library I paused as I was rifling through the C’s. Cursive is a local band who has gained some international acclaim. I don’t care so much for their newer material. They’ve been around for a while and have succumbed to the same problem all bands with any sort of longevity fall to. It seems that only young men have the fire for really great music, and as we age and grow better in every other regard, we seem to lose the edge that is responsible for truly inspired musical compositions. Nevertheless Cursive, local or not, has produced two albums which I feel are every bit as good as any other band I ever liked; 1997’s Such Blinding Stars For Starving Eyes and 1998’s The Storms Of Early Summer.

The title of their 2005 release The Difference Between Houses And Homes flipped a switch in my head as I was browsing for some writing music this morning. I stopped to think about what a great title it was, and what it made me think about as my eyes scanned it.

The difference between a house and a home is what we put into it.

Architecture is an allegory for what the phrase really means, as it can be relevant to more than just wood and steel structures. Certainly there is a difference between a house and a home, a job and a career, a labor and a passion.

It made me think about how it applied to the endeavor of blogging and creating websites and communities in the ether that is the internet. Certainly the phrase can apply to websites and blogs, but are all blogs necessarily homes?

Blogs are frequently updated websites maintained by an individual or a team. There is usually at least a loose focus of subject material covered. Because the blog is created and maintained by one person or a small number of people, a sense of familiarity grows between the reader and the blog’s writer(s). This is one of the aspects of blogging that makes it such a successful format. I may go to espn.com because I want a game score, and I happen to know that they have exactly what I’m looking for, but I don’t go there because I have any interest in what their nameless writers are churning out. I do go to Untwisted Vortex to see what Richard has been up to. I have no idea what I’m going to get when I get there, but I have developed a sense of familiarity with Rich and his blog. I became interested after reading a few articles, and you know what? I stayed. This is the power of the blog format at work folks. ESPN has a house, one hell of a nice, big, expensive house, but Rich has built a home over at Untwisted Vortex. It’s comfortable there and I like visiting him every now and then.

Another local turned blogging kingpin Jeremy Schoemaker has had about as much success as any blogger could hope for with his blog ShoeMoney. Despite the fact that Jeremy probably makes more in a month than I will ever see from my combined blogging efforts, Jeremy has built a home over at ShoeMoney and he doesn’t screw around with the formula.

Gawker Media is behind a lot of big name blogs. Gizmodo, Kotaku, The Consumerist, Lifehacker and more are all in the Gawker stable. All of these have a monthly readership of 1+ million, and every single one a big, fat, empty house. Gawker Media is very much like the construction firm in your town that churns out neighborhoods of identical homes. Not a single mature tree in sight, and don’t trip in the hallway, you’re liable to put a shoulder right through the papier mache thin walls. No substance, no personality. I doubt the readers of Lifehacker or The Consumerist can name a single writer on these sites. It doesn’t really matter. They’re expendable, and sites like this will keep chugging away regardless of who is writing. It’s everything that is wrong with blogging. In fact, these sites don’t want to be blogs at all, but they lack the chops to run with the mainstream media sites they so obviously envy and want to be like. You can have them.

I’ve talked time and again about things to do to make your site a success. I hope that this makes sense to you as well: Make your blog a home. It will make you stand unique among your blogging peers, and doing so will make the people that find the home you’ve made inviting return again and again. I hope that the team at CI is doing so, and will continue to do so. This is the home we’ve made. We put something of ourselves into it. In the end, we hope that you found it inviting and comfortable, and we hope you come visit us again.

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