This blog will be on a topic of your choosing that has some kind of civic dimension, some niche audience, or some universal appeal. When you are choosing your passion blog topic, think carefully about how you might sustain this blog over several weeks. How will you introduce new topics? How will you interest and inform your readers? How will you invite readers to comment? What is the function of this blog? Name your blog something specific and engaging–don’t name it “passion blog”!
Types of Passion Blogs:
Political Blogs: You could advocate from the position of a particular political ideology, such as liberal, conservative, libertarian, etc. The topics of these blogs might be diverse, but feature news items and analysis that would reflect a certain political agenda. You might also advocate, analyze, or report about a single political issue, such as health care reform.
Examples: The Center for American Progess Website, The Huffington Post, and Reason.com. Some blogsites also serve as watchdog groups, such as Fact Check.org, an organization that analyzes claims in politics and the media.
Lifestyle Blogs: These blogs connect people to their interests and help readers live a certain lifestyle, well, better. This kind of blog might also offer narratives, reflection, and analysis of the blogger’s own experience or “journey” that would be compelling and relatable to its audience.
Examples: Hungry Girl serves as a resource for dieters and foodies alike, providing low-cal recipes, weight loss tips, and journals about weight loss “journeys,” as it were. You can imagine Carrie Bradshaw’s column on Sex and the City, if it were online, as a kind of lifestyle blog. A mom might write a weekly blog on motherhood. PSU’s own Valley Magazine offers lifestyle tips for the stylish college student.
Project, Experience, or Experiment Blogs: This genre of blog details an experience or project and varies somewhat from the lifestyle blogs in that they are experimental or experiential in nature.
Examples. For travel, check out The Everywhereist. Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me and follow-up show Thirty Days function as video diaries of his various undertakings. The movie Julie and Julia is based on a real-life blogger’s project to cook Julia Child’s recipes for one year. Potential topics: pledging a fraternity or sorority, observing drinking culture, working out every day, reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, etc. (be sure your topic is safe and appropriate).
Entertainment and Pop Culture Blogs: These blogs provide news, summaries, and analysis of the world of entertainment. You might devote your blog to an episodic TV show, such as Lost or American Idol, literature, music, or film reviews, fashion, etc. While all blogs should be written in a lively manner, entertainment blogs in particular need to be engaging. The blog prose and analysis should be crisp, entertaining, and insightful.
Examples: The Entertainment Weekly Website has some fantastic entertainment blogs – Darrin Franich’s Jersey Shore blog is a work of art. A spin-off to this genre is The Colbert Report’s fan-created blogsite The No-Fact Zone, a site humorously invested in snarky political satire, as its bloggers amplify and extend the faux politics and aggrandizement of Stephen Colbert’s character.
Sports or Hobby Blogs: A sub-genre of entertainment blogs, sports and hobby blogs are written for like-minded fans who seek additional analysis, news, and speculation.
Example: the Steeler-centric blog Behind the Steel Curtain.
Academic Blogs and “Smart People” Blogs: An academic blog might take up an academic topic, such as the philosophy of mind, Irish studies, the history of local Native Americans, developments in bariatric surgery, etc., and write mini-treatises, essays, and reviews on those topics. A variation on this theme are the blogsites written by academics and well-established social critics and writers. Sometimes, these bloggers are invited to become part of an exclusive blogsite, such as Crooked Timber.
Examples: Some regular bloggers in Penn State’s English Department are Michael B�rub� and Debra Hawhee.